In-Depth Archive

More than 11 years after the International Criminal Court issued a warrant for Dominic Ongwen’s arrest, and nearly two years after he was captured and transferred to The Hague, his prosecution finally began in December. Ongwen, a former senior commander in the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), faces 70 counts, including charges of murder, enslavement, rape and torture. He allegedly committed or oversaw these atrocities as part of the Ugandan rebel militia’s bloody campaign against the people of northern Uganda’s Acholiland that originally began in 1987. Though the LRA remains active in pockets of central Africa, it was driven from Uganda […]

The world economy is caught in a vicious cycle that it cannot seem to break. It all began in 2008 with the shock of the global financial crisis followed two years later by the slow drip of the European debt crisis. In response to these events and the worldwide recession that accompanied them, many countries took steps to protect their economies from international instability and foreign competition. Yet creeping protectionism just acted as a further drag on economic growth. Continued tepid growth helped fuel the growing protectionist backlash in the industrialized world, which is poised to deliver a level of […]

In its 2017 World Report, Human Rights Watch slammed Australia’s offshore detention of asylum-seekers on Manus Island and Nauru as draconian and abusive. The report criticized not only the treatment of asylum-seekers, but also the government’s measures—overturned by the High Court in October—to gag service-providers working at offshore camps, who can face criminal charges and other penalties if they go public with information about detention conditions. The Human Rights Watch report comes on the heels of the alleged bashing of two Iranian asylum-seekers on Manus by Papua New Guinea police on New Year’s Eve, as well as the 2016 publication […]

Revolutions, by their intrinsic idealism, generate ideological extremism and destructive policies. Like the lava of an active volcano that indiscriminately burns everything in its path, revolutionary extremism devours what stands in its way. The 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran was no exception. It brought to power idealistic and self-righteous revolutionaries with the mission to establish an Islamic order in Iran and beyond. Opponents of this agenda, many of whom operated outside of the new system, have been brutally suppressed. Individuals within the governing elite have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to soften this revolutionary extremism and gradually reform the […]

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States imperils the liberal international order that America has championed since World War II. That open world was already operating under strain, challenged by rivals and upheaval abroad. But suddenly, it is vulnerable at home, too. A wave of angry populism has propelled to power a nationalist leader who campaigned on a promise to put “America First.” As a candidate, Trump questioned longstanding U.S. alliances like NATO, criticized international institutions like the United Nations, and promised to abandon major trade, arms control and climate agreements. Little wonder that liberal internationalists […]

In 1987, in the twilight years of the Soviet Union, when Mikhail Gorbachev’s perestroika was loosening the screws on free enterprise, high-school teacher Bronislav Zeltserman opened a new teaching center in Riga, the capital of what was then the Latvian Soviet Socialist Republic. In a country receptive to new ideas for the first time since the 1950s, Zeltserman hoped to develop academic thinking and rear a new generation of students connected to the West. Tapping into the spirit of the times, he called his project “Experiment.” The Soviet Union collapsed four years later, in 1991. Today, the small Baltic nation […]