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Almost 30 years ago, then-Prince Charles declared that he wanted to be a “defender of faith,” rather than simply “Defender of the Faith,” to reflect Britain’s growing religious diversity. It created a bit of a storm in a teacup, as he had clearly not meant that he would be changing the traditional role so much as adding to it. The new King is a particular type of Anglican: one that on the one hand, is incredibly tied to the notion of tradition; but on the other, has shown a great deal of affinity for both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam, two religions clearly outside the Anglican fold that he must now titularly lead.

the King has been quite public about his admiration for Islam as a religion, and Muslim communities, both in Britain and abroad.

Privately, he’s shown a lot of sympathy for where Muslims are in difficult political situations, both in Europe and further afield. Robert Jobson’s recent Charles at Seventy claims that the King has significant sympathies for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, for example. It’s also claimed that he disagreed with dress restrictions imposed on Muslim women in various European countries.

This is the first program to be hit with a gag order by the US government, but it likely will not be the last. Instead, this gag order hopes to stimulate a programmatic shift in the way all Middle East studies programs who utilize Title VI funds teach about the Middle East and Islam.

As graduate students involved in the Duke-UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, we will not kowtow to the state—this state or any other. Our first preoccupation is critical thinking and academic freedom, which is integrally linked to the pursuit of justice. We reject the premise of this gag order and its underlying intentions. We stand against all forms of discrimination—racial, religious, gender, sexuality, class, age, ability, and otherwise—in particular as a result of state vision and rhetoric. We will not support imperialism, jingoism, and military hegemony, and we do not support the idea that these are necessary for maintaining peace in any nation, including the US.

In Iraq, the protesters mostly consisted of angry young working-class men, and they were quickly confronted with violence. In Lebanon, meanwhile, the protests have been marked by that country’s unmistakable sense of style and festive spirit, and the initiators have mostly been from the upper social classes. In downtown Beirut this past weekend, the sea of protesters included a woman in white-rimmed retro sunglasses with her dog named Pucci and a young man waving a Lebanese flag while lying in an inflatable kiddie pool. Yet despite the stark contrast between the protests, the rebels in both countries are in fact very similar. They are confronting many of the same political problems and are making essentially the same demand. They want the downfall of their countries’ existing self-serving elites, and big changes to the sectarian constitutional systems that enabled them

if austerity measures were a trigger, the protesters now have much bigger complaints on their minds

Iraqi protesters share the Lebanese view of their ruling elite as corrupt and inefficient (although they have also learned their government is quicker to resort to violence to restore order)

If the unofficial reports of dead and wounded are anywhere near accurate, this might be the most deadly uprising since the 1979 revolution.

Iran’s turmoil is not driven by U.S. policies, nor is it merely some circumstantial spasm. The protests are the latest salvo in the Iranian struggle for accountable government that stretches back more than a century. And the fury and desperation of the Iranians on the streets this week strikes at the heart of the legitimacy of the revolutionary system.

After the monarchy was ousted, collective action — both spontaneous and opportunistic — was a primary mechanism for gaining advantage in the chaotic struggle for power.

Qatar has not simply spent money to import and train a soccer team: It has also redefined the very idea of citizenship. Like most states in the Persian Gulf, Qatar is a majority-foreigner country. There are only about 300,000 actual Qatari passport holders out of a population of nearly 3 million. Pathways to citizenship are notoriously exclusive, and only 50 new citizenships can be granted per year to those personally approved by the emir of Qatar himself. Yet 10 of the 26 players on Qatar’s national soccer team are naturalized citizens. To comply with FIFA regulations, the entire team consists of Qatari citizens. But these naturalized soccer players are not quite immigrant-origin  national heroes, in the vein of Zinedine Zidane or Zlatan Ibrahimovic. These immigrant players all carry “mission passports”—documents that confer citizenship for the purposes of sports competition

this type of citizenship comes with a built-in expiration date, making these immigrant players’ citizenships temporary as well as second class.

Tibetans in exile have been granted pseudo-passports—but not citizenship—by India. Residents of American Samoa are “U.S. nationals” not possessing the full rights of citizenship. The disintegration of Yugoslavia left thousands of Roma people stateless. Issues of statelessness and ambiguous citizenship are universal in any part of the world which experiences crisis and conflict.

At least 20 people were killed and dozens were wounded in clashes that spread across several Iraqi provinces on Thursday.

renewed clashes occurred despite a massive security dragnet mounted by the government in an effort to quash the economically-driven protests

Protesters directed their anger at a government and political class they say is corrupt and doing nothing to improve their lives. They demanded jobs, better services and called for the "downfall of the regime".

Political leaders are usually insulated from major health scares by their wealth and access to private health care. But the coronavirus has already impacted leaders across the world

The consequences will be very different in countries where political institutions are weaker and where the illness or death of a leader has been known to generate the kind of power vacuum that might inspire rival leaders, opposition parties, or the military to launch a power grab. This is a particular problem in countries where checks and balances are weak and political parties don’t have strong decision-making mechanisms, which is true in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Europe

In countries where politics are more personalized, the death of a leader can trigger damaging succession battles that can split the ruling party and, in the worst cases, encourage a military coup

In 2019 SOS International (SOSi), a Virginia company with links to the U.S. military, won exclusive access to mines across Afghanistan. President Ashraf Ghani’s brother is a major shareholder of a SOSi subsidiary. President Ghani granted this SOSi subsidiary, Southern Development, rights to buy artisanally mined ore. Southern Development operates a mineral processing plant on the outskirts of Kabul. The inroads made by SOSi and Southern Development into Afghanistan’s mining sector have roots in a 2011 initiative by U.S. special forces to work illegally with members of a pro-government Afghan militia on mining in Kunar province. Although shut down after an inquiry, these Kunar projects have since been quietly restarted as a private venture, and are benefitting those closest to the president.

The Taliban and other armed groups have battled both the central government and each other for control of the mines, using them to fund their insurgencies. Even former U.S. President Donald Trump coveted Afghanistan’s gold, lithium, uranium, and other mineral riches. In 2017, Trump was persuaded to keep troops in the country by its president, Ashraf Ghani, who dangled the prospect of mining contracts for American companies.

In 2011, American Special Forces operators introduced an eastern Kunar paramilitary commander, Noor Mohammed, and his deputy, known as Farhad, to a small Pentagon business development office called the Task Force for Stability and Business Operations. The Task Force, which operated in Iraq and Afghanistan, aimed to create jobs for locals in key industries like mining as part of a broader counterinsurgency strategy. In theory, good jobs would stop Afghans from joining the militants. “Their mission, to create small-scale, sustainable mining operations for the Afghans, was a solid fit to our FID [Foreign Internal Defense] mission,” said Heinz Dinter, a former Special Forces officer. The commandos asked the Task Force to help the two local warlords, who were illegally dealing in chromite, a valuable anti-corrosion additive used in stainless steel and aircraft paint. Afghan chromite is prized for its exceptional purity. With a crusher provided by the Pentagon, Mohammed and Farhad began to process their ore at Combat Outpost Penich, a small NATO base in eastern Kunar.

The re-election of the conservative-nationalist group, founded and led by Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has heightened fears among the journalists and academics that freedom of the press will be further restricted in the party's pursuit of a proposed "new media order".  PiS announced in its 232-page election manifesto that it wanted to regulate the status of journalists

The deputy culture minister, Pawel Lewandowski, has said: "[The media] is a type of state power. "We must have 100 percent certainty that everything that happens in Poland is overseen by the Polish authorities."

Since 2015, PiS has taken control of public companies, the courts and state-run broadcasting in its remoulding of society.  Press freedom in Poland has fallen from 18th to 58th place out of 180 countries in an annual index conducted by Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Analyses of security threats in the continent focus on fragile and failing states, ethnic rivalries, violent extremism, and conflict over natural resources. African governments are seen as too weak to project power as far as their borders, let alone across them. And indeed, since African countries achieved independence in the 1950s and 1960s—and especially since 1964, when the newly founded Organisation of African Unity adopted its “Cairo Declaration” on the inviolability of inherited colonial boundaries—there have been few border wars and just two successful secessions (Eritrea and South Sudan). There have been only a handful of regime change invasions—such as when Tanzania toppled Uganda’s Idi Amin in 1979, and Libya’s invasion of Chad under Muammar al-Qaddafi.

armed rivalry takes different, disguised forms: covert war and proxy war between states is common—in fact, it’s standard. Scratch below the surface of any civil war and there’s usually a foreign sponsor to be found

Most of the time, involvement in a neighbor’s war is authorized at the highest level and implemented systematically, if secretively, by military intelligence or national security

The Oct. 13 landslide victory for outsider presidential candidate Kais Saied was historic by any measure. After an unpredictable contest in which voters appeared determined to purge traditional parties and public figures that have dominated the post-Arab Spring landscape, Tunisian politics has entered a new era –– though exactly what comes next is anyone’s guess.

Riding a wave of revolt that was driven by an unorthodox coalition of students, anti-corruption voters and conservatives, Saied rose from relative obscurity little more than a year ago to best an original field of 27 candidates and seize the highest political office in the land.

everybody has their own interpretation of the 61-year-old professor’s message.  “Some accuse me of being a Salafist, others of being a radical leftist,” the candidate said critically during the Oct. 11 presidential debate. “But I have always been an independent and will die an independent.”

Despite the collapse of its so-called "caliphate" in the Middle East, and the killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, however, ISIL remains a growing and evolving threat in other parts of the world, especially in Africa's restive Sahel region. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the prodigy of ISIL there, is going from strength to strength, bolstering its membership and carrying out attacks.

Most of the states that have territory in the Sahel are grappling with the destructive effects of climate change, poverty, food shortages, ethnic conflicts and lack of effective democratic governance. There is little opportunity for the people in the region to receive an education and find work that would allow them to sustain their families. Moreover, they live in fear of being attacked by one of the numerous local armed groups that are active there. This is causing many to embark on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to reach Europe's shores and seek sanctuary there. All this creates an ample opportunity for terror groups like ISIL to expand their influence over the region.

Burkina Faso is now stuck in a vicious cycle where the problems that allowed armed groups like ISIL to infiltrate the country are being exacerbated by their presence, while the resulting desperation is causing more people to join them.

are the revolutions of the Arab world and its neighbourhood back? Or perhaps more accurately - did they go anywhere to begin with? How are we to read these seemingly similar uprisings reminiscent of the glorious days and nights of Tahrir Square writ large?

Two counter-revolutionary forces have sought to derail the Arab revolutions: the governments of regional authoritarian powers (with the help of the United States and Israel) on one side and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) - the offspring of their geopolitical machinations - on the other.

Since this new wave of protests began, various attempts have been made to explain them in the context of global or local trends.  Similar demonstrations have taken place around the world and been attributed to the austerity measures of incompetent governments. In Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, public anger with economic mismanagement has sent thousands of people on to the streets.

Somalia has been spinning on a crisis carousel: war, famine, terrorism, climate stress. Now, the coronavirus pandemic is set to steer the country towards another hemorrhaging of human life. Even with a youth population above 70 percent, the virus will likely compound Somalia’s chronic medley of miseries. With each passing day, an uneasy question looms large: If the pandemic has left such death and upheaval in its wake in the world’s most powerful countries, what impact will it have on one of the world’s most fragile?

a psychological readiness for catastrophe. Extreme violence has long been a fact of daily life in Mogadishu, under siege by one of the deadliest terrorist groups in Africa, al-Shabab, which, by conservative estimates, has killed more than 3,000 people in the past five years and wounded tens of thousands in the past decade. Somalis, often touted for their resilience amid unrelenting adversity, are no strangers to mass loss of life.

As of Monday, 1,054 infections—out of a miniscule testing pool—and 51 deaths have been confirmed. The true spread is doubtless far worse.

America already has an ISIS, a Taliban, an SS waiting to be born. A group of young men willing to do violence at the drop of a hat, because they’ve been brainwashed into hating. The demagogue has blamed hated minorities and advocates of democracy and peace for those young men’s stunted life chances, and they believe him. That’s exactly what an ISIS is, what a Taliban is, what an SS is. The only thing left to do by an authoritarian is to formalize it.

when radicalized young men are killing people they have been taught to hate by demagogues right in the open, on the streets — a society has reached the beginnings of sectarian violence, the kind familiar in the Islamic world, and is at the end of democracy’s road.

Crucial institutions have already been captured by the extremist factions who stand against democracy. Do all those cops think of themselves as fascists? Of course they don’t. So what? Mullahs don’t think of themselves as hate preachers, either. What else do you call someone who gives a violent young man with a gun a free pass to kill people, though? Someone who tries to shield him after the murder? A good and decent person?The police in America might not all think they are fascists. Certainly, not all of them are. But what is certain is that some significant number of them are captured. They are sympathetic to the forces which are now attacking democracy. They prioritize those forces over democracy, freedom, peace, justice.

Turkish authorities have seized possession of the country’s oldest and richest archaeobotanical and modern seed collections from the British Institute at Ankara, one of the most highly regarded foreign research institutes in Turkey, particularly in the field of archaeology. The move has sounded alarm bells among the foreign research community and is seen as part of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s wider xenophobia-tinged campaign to inject Islamic nationalism into all aspects of Turkish life.

“staff from the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, the General Directorate for Museums and Heritage from the Ministry of Culture and the Turkish Presidency took away 108 boxes of archaeobotanical specimens and 4 cupboards comprising the modern seed reference collections” to depots in a pair of government-run museums in Ankara. The institute’s request for extra time “to minimize the risk of damage or loss to the material was refused.”

Coming on the heels of the controversial conversions of the Hagia Sophia and Chora Museum into full service mosques this summer, the seizure has left the research community in a state of shock, sources familiar with the affair said.