To the average American iPhone owner, the components and inner workings of the smartphone are somewhat of an enigma. To the poor farmers of Baotou, a city in northern China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, they are less so. Though the grand majority of Baotou farmers barely earn enough to feed and clothe their families, much […]
A Most Supreme Pen Pal
Iran’s Supreme Leader has taken an unprecedented step towards resolving the “clash of civilizations” between the Western and Islamic worlds. Should we be optimistic?
The One Thing ISIS is Good For: Answering 100-Year-Old Questions
If made into a blockbuster drama, the history of the Kurds in Turkey would make a killing at the box office. It is a tale of betrayal and bloodshed, repression and revolution. Turkish Kurds have experienced a turbulent past of subjugation, violence, economic assistance, violence, peace talks, and more violence. Turkey’s uncertainty in how to […]
Waves of Terror: The Islamic State and Water as a Weapon of War
The ground is dry and cracked. Tan desert stretches for miles in either direction and the air is saturated with brown dust. The fine sand from nearby dunes stirred up in the hot breeze. This is the Iraqi desert. It is nearly uninhabited, heat and drought having made it hostile to human life. Less than […]
An Arab Summer: The Struggle to Create a New Libya
October 20, 2011: The world watched, transfixed, as Libyan rebels violently ended the life of Muammar Qadhafi, dictator of 42 years, whose reign of censorship and oppression drove the Libyan people to civil war and revolution. Violence and bloodshed aside, there is something irrationally romantic about Libya’s revolution and those others that materialized throughout the […]
The Trouble in Istanbul: Not Just Another Arab Spring
When protests broke out in Istanbul’s Taksim Square in May 2013, the world braced itself for another of the Arab Spring uprisings that exploded across the Middle East’s landscape in 2011. Though technically a secular democracy since 1923, to many a Western eye, Turkey continues to be lumped with its authoritarian-ruled, Islamic Republic neighbors. People […]