'Historian James Renton suggests that this week's application for UN membership by the Palestinians could provide the moral and legal backing required to achieve the reality of statehood, much as the Balfour Declaration of 1917 laid the ground for the birth of the Israeli state in 1948.
In this eventful month of September, the Israeli (Arab) spring has to decide: where does it stand, first and foremost, in regard to Palestine, but also in regard to Turkey and Egypt.
At their very best, Israeli-Palestinian partition plans envision the same kind of complex ethnic patchwork rejected by western diplomats in Bosnia.
A near-decade of rule by Turkey’s governing AKP has reshaped the state and consolidated the party’s clear political hegemony. But this very success exposes serious remaining problems in Turkish democracy, says Gunes Murat Tezcur.
In today's security briefing, Jaffar Al-Rikabi argues that rival interventions by outside powers threaten to intensify violence in Syria. Meanwhile, a gas discovery in the Eastern Mediterranean may add to disputes in the region.
It is time to challenge the conventional explanations of gender based violence. Patricia Daley argues that it can only be understood in association with contemporary geo-economic forces and the Central African experience of modernity
On her return from Tunisia, the author kept in touch with some of the young people in the south, and began a diary recording their ongoing struggle. We publish as in Kasserine, talk is of a general strike and death threats in Tunis.
The author, who travelled to Tunisia last April, recorded her multicultural experiences at a time of revolution to share, as requested, with the outside world. In Part Two, she has kept in touch with some of the young people in the south to update us on the grim realities of their ongoing struggle
The return to democracy in Nepal after the decade-long civil war has been bumpy. The question of amnesty for crimes committed during the war now faces the new Maoist-led government with a key choice, says Meenakshi Ganguly.
David Cameron’s recent visit to Russia was the subject of some snide criticism in the Russian and British press. But this superficial approach misses the main point: the purpose of the visit lay elsewhere and a good day’s work was done by both sides, says Britain’s former ambassador Tony Brenton
The tendency to press reality into a heritage mould traps England in political aspic, says David Hayes.
It is Belhadj’s voice more than that of the others that has the greatest potential to disrupt the official 9/11 memorialisation. It threatened to make a mockery of their declared humanitarian intentions, as it exposed these governments’ past complicity in the crimes of the region’s dictators, incl
