Radical Movements Archive

A routine intervention by security forces turns deadly, causing deeply rooted and widely felt grievances that have lain dormant for years and even decades to erupt into view. Spontaneous protests grow into organized demonstrations, ending in violent confrontations, and at times even riots. By now we’ve become familiar with the sequence of catalyzing events that trigger widespread political instability. It is a pattern that describes Tunisia, Egypt and Syria in 2011, and we are used to thinking of it in terms of fragile states on the periphery. But it also describes the events in Charlotte, North Carolina, last week, following […]

The United Nations took a historic step earlier this month, for the first time naming a victim of human trafficking as a goodwill ambassador for the dignity of survivors of such atrocities. Nadia Murad Basee Taha, a 23-year-old Yazidi woman who survived months of captivity as a sex slave of the self-proclaimed Islamic State, was appointed to the position at a ceremony at U.N. headquarters in New York. She gives an international voice to the brutalized young women and children of the Yazidi religious minority, the victims of barbarity and sexual enslavement in northern Iraq. Murad’s new role provides some […]

In a story that reads like a crime thriller, The New York Times’ Rukmini Callimachi and Lorenzo Tondo reported last week on new routes for smuggling hashish from Morocco to Europe that raise suspicions about whether the self-proclaimed Islamic State is profiting off the drug trade. The hashish routes wind their way across the eastern Mediterranean through Libya, a roundabout passage that avoids the usual short run—often on small boats and even jet skis—across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. There are two reasons for the new route, Callimachi and Tondo write: more police surveillance along the Spanish coast in […]

Confusion, mistakes and misfires on the battlefield are hardly unusual. To the contrary, they are a common occurrence in warfare. But last Saturday, after U.S. warplanes launching airstrikes in Syria against the so-called Islamic State struck instead a group of Syrian army forces, what followed was, if not unusual, informative. The aftermath of the incident highlighted the Middle East’s propensity to find murky motives behind easily explainable events, exacerbated by the widespread confusion about the strategic objectives of the war’s combatants, notably the United States. As soon as news emerged of the U.S. airstrikes in Deir el-Zour, which Russian officials […]

China has a growing terrorism problem. For many years Beijing believed it could avoid transnational extremism simply by staying out of the security affairs of other nations. But this no longer works. Just as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan found that leaving extremists alone did not protect them from terrorism, China is reluctantly being drawn into the conflict with global Islamic extremism. Two things are driving this. China’s growing international presence, both governmental and business, has set off an “antibody reaction.” Chinese nationals have become targets of terrorism simply because they are foreigners from a rich great power, rather than because […]

One of the most momentous decisions the United States made after 9/11 was to go on the offensive against violent extremists, seeking to cut them off at their source. This was to be done by helping governments in the Islamic world provide prosperity, security, justice and a sense of national identity. While sound in theory, this forced the U.S. to work with deeply flawed partners and repeatedly crashed against three problems. First, extremists, appropriating or misappropriating religious themes and local grievances, are often deeply ingrained in the societies where they operate, whether by ethnicity, clan, tribe or religion. Second, political […]

In this week’s episode, WPR’s senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, and host Peter Dörrie discuss the moral case against celebrating world peace, ethnic protests in Ethiopia, and post-Cold War threats to democracy. For the report, David Hutt joins us to talk about the debate in Malaysia over a bill to introduce strict Islamic codes and the challenges of managing the country’s diversity. Listen: Download: MP3Subscribe: iTunes | RSS Relevant Articles on WPR: The Moral Case Against Celebrating World Peace Ethiopia’s Regime Prioritizes Power Over Reform as Ethnic Protests Continue The West Faces a New Cold War With Democracy Under Threat Again […]