Arab & Islamic Politics

Speaking about Iran at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on January 30, U.S. secretary of state Madeleine Albright commented, "There is an attempt to probe a possibility of dialogue and we are waiting to see what happens in the Majlis [Parliament] election next month." What are the procedures

A good indicator of Russia's role in the Middle East is that Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak had no plans to return to Israel to be present for Boris Yeltsin's visit there even before Yeltsin stepped down as Russian president. The Israeli leader preferred to remain in the United States

A landmark study that offers clear and understandable answers to fundamental questions about the most complex facets of the Iranian regime, probing the lines between hardliners and reformers, revolutionary and national interests, theocracy and electoral politics, and more.

After a half-decade in which the Balkans, Central Africa, and East Asia were the hottest spots on the globe, the Middle East--including North Africa--is likely to assert itself over the next five years as a zone of turbulence. Some of the turmoil will be fueled by the irredentism left over

On December 22, Sudanese president Umar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir met Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak in Cairo on Bashir's first visit there in six years. The day before, he met the leaders of four other Sudanese neighbors (Libya, Eritrea, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo) in Tripoli, Libya. These visits

U.S. president Bill Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak will lead their respective national delegations at this week’s historic set of Syria-Israel peace talks, but Syrian president Hafiz al-Asad is sending his foreign minister in his stead. By keeping himself at one remove from the talks, Asad retains certain

ROBERT SATLOFF General Observations Meetings with the four leaders--Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, Jordan's King Abdullah II, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, and Palestinian Authority (PA) chairman Yasir Arafat--underscore the vitality of regional leadership. All seemed healthy, engaged, self-assured, and in command. Barak is clearly a man with a mission, convinced

The Chechen crisis is the result of confluence of long-term and recent political, economic and military trends in Russia. Chief among them is the decline of the Russian state, the weakness of its institutions and their inability to address the consequences of the protracted socio-economic decline in the North Caucasus--one

Last week's meeting of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) revealed at once the new power of the organization to manage world oil prices, as well as the fault lines that could undermine the group's current consensus. Maintaining Discipline Keeps Prices High By maintaining the production cuts that the