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Jean-Pierre Cassarino holds a professorship at the Robert Schuman Center for Advanced Studies (RSCAS/European University Institute, Florence) where he directs the Return migration and Development Platform (http://rsc.eui.eu/RDP/). He is also research associate at the Tunis-based Institut de Recherche sur le Maghreb Contemporain (IRMC). Since the mid-1990s, he has published extensively on international migration, particularly on return migration and has carried out numerous field surveys investigating returnees’ manifold patterns of reintegration. Selected publications include: (ed.) Unbalanced Reciprocities: Cooperation on Readmission in the Euro-Mediterranean Area, The Middle East Institute Press, Washington, 2010; (ed.) “Conditions of Modern Return Migrants”, International Journal on Multicultural Societies, Vol. 10, Issue 2, UNESCO, Paris, 2008; (ed.) Return Migrants to the Maghreb Countries: Reintegration and development challenges, RSCAS, European University Institute, Florence, 2008; Tunisian New Entrepreneurs and their Past Experiences of Migration in Europe: Networks, Resource Mobilisation, and Hidden Disaffection. Ashgate Publishers, Aldershot, 2000. Email: [email protected]
Understanding Iran’s foreign policy is the key to crafting sensible and effective policies toward Iran and requires, above all, a close analysis of the profound cultural and psychological contexts of Iranian foreign policy behavior.
South Asia is a region in crisis — plagued by a set of interlocking problems that have deep and tangled roots. And Pakistan, not Afghanistan, is at the center.
Afghanistan has been plagued by war for 30 years. The conflicts that have occurred during this time have involved major world powers, Afghanistan’s neighbors, and various Afghan factions. The cumulative toll of these conflicts on the country and its people is enormous. Yet, despite three calamitous decades of death and destruction, peace and stability is achievable.
The move to hold a second round of elections in Afghanistan on November 7, 2009 has at least had one positive result: it has brought out the fundamental limitations of introducing Western democratic election processes in a deeply divided society that, moreover, is at war with itself and with external forces.
