News and views from the Blavatnik School of Government community 
For the first time ever, the Iraqi Kurds have seriously raised the flag of independence and recently made several critical steps forwards for this purpose. The process has been rolled out with no chances of return. The date for the independence referendum has been set: September 25, 2017. Although going […]
The military campaign for the liberation of the Islamic State’s stronghold city of Mosul, the capital city of Nineveh province, has begun today. After twenty-eight months of controlling the second-largest city of Iraq, ISIS’s chapter in Iraq will be brought almost to an end. Yet as the most diversified and […]
Establishing progress towards economic and social prosperity – not just political change – is essential for Arab Countries in transition If a single word can summarize everything the young Arab protestors were trying to express during the Arab Spring, the word would be Dignity. Living with dignity was the manifestation […]
“For us, the future is lost. There is no hope.” That’s what Ali Ahmad told BBC interviewers who were trying to find out what life was like under the current war in Yemen. Ali comes from Taiz, a governorate that has for months been under siege by the militias of […]
Two years after Edward Snowden leaked thousands of classified files detailing the West’s surveillance programmes, another whistleblower has revealed more secret documents, this time detailing the US drone strike operations against Islamist terrorists in East Africa, the Arabian peninsula and Afghanistan. Published by The Intercept website as The Drone Papers, […]
I will never forget the night of March 25th 2015, the day coalition forces started bombing Yemen. I rushed out of my safe Oxford library at 3 am to call my mother back in Sana’a. I could hear my always-strong mother scared of the unknown as she hid in the […]
Twelve years ago we stumbled into a war in Iraq with little thought as to how much it would cost or how we might pay for it. Trillions of dollars later, we are about to wade into another protracted conflict, and once again there is no financial strategy.
As the Ukraine crisis continues and Russia maintains its hard line in the territorial dispute ignited over Crimea, it is worth reviewing a paper written over five years ago by one of the Blavatnik School’s academics. BSG Professor Monica Duffy Toft has spent her academic career researching issues of international […]
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