Archive for Weekly Comment

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18/11/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment, 3 Oct 2014

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What’s going to happen to us without barbarians? They were, those people, a kind of solution. CP Cafavy, (prominent modern Greek poet, 1863-1933) There is

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15/07/2014

Conflicts Forum Weekly Comment: ISIS: Back to Pre-Islamic Arab structures

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Sunnism has always had a particular link with the state. (We are not talking Westphalia here, with its homogenous national identities, but something more complex,

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26/05/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 16 – 23 May 2014

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Are we heading towards a hot ‘summer of discontent’?  It seems so. The geo-strategic political situation certainly has its needle wavering towards escalating tensions, and

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25/05/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 9 – 16 May 2014

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It seems set for escalation towards another round of sanctions on Russia:  The ‘round table’ talks in Kiev bore no fruit.  But rather, as we see

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18/05/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 2 – 9 May 2014

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Professor Stephen Walt noted somewhat wryly in a recent article that perhaps one of Bill Clinton’s worst predictions consisted in 1992 remark, in which he said, “in a world

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10/05/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 25 April – 2 May 2014

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Following five days in Moscow, a few thoughts on Russian perspectives:  Firstly, we are beyond the Crimea. That is over. We too are beyond ‘loose’ federalism for Ukraine

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25/04/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 11 – 18 April 2014

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It is a “melancholy perspective indeed”, writes Yezid Sayigh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre. “But the time when Assad might have been defeated by a truly inept opposition

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18/04/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 4 – 11 April 2014

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In the sense that the outcome to P5+1 negotiations with Iran will mark a key inflection point for the Middle East – one way or

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13/04/2014

Conflicts Forum’s Weekly Comment 28 March – 4 April 2014

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We noted last week that President Obama’s key Middle East foreign policy issues had turned suddenly sour – on the eve of President Obama and

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