Research & Commentary Results

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan finds himself in a tough spot with Russia as tensions in Syria have escalated dramatically. In a rare direct military confrontation between Turkish and Syrian regime forces, 14 Turkish soldiers and over 100 regime troops were killed in two separate clashes in Idlib over the past 10 days.

The relationship between Iran and Russia has been strengthened by the rising tensions between Tehran and Washington since Donald Trump took office, and there is no doubt that Iran views Russia as one of its closest allies. The Iranian foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif, has traveled to Moscow some 28 times during his tenure, and has stated that relations between the two countries have never been better.

On Feb. 21, Iranians will be voting to elect a new Majlis, the country’s unicameral Parliament. Viewed from the outside, participating in the electoral system might seem futile. While the Iranian constitution recognizes popular will, as represented by an elected president and Parliament, the whole political system operates under the supreme leader, who, although appointed by an elected clerical body (the Assembly of Experts), is, in effect, answerable to no one. The Majlis does, however, have the power to remove the president — a fate that could potentially await President Hassan Rouhani if the conservatives win a majority in the upcoming elections.

Since the beginning of the Syrian civil war in 2011, many analysts have examined the role played by a handful of key outside actors, such as Russia, Iran, Turkey, and the member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC). Yet China has received comparatively little attention in most discussions about the Syrian crisis. A deeper look at Sino-Syrian relations and Beijing’s policies vis-à-vis Syria is long overdue as this bilateral relationship is set to become increasingly important to both China’s ambitious foreign policy as well as the Syrian government’s vision for reconstruction and redevelopment.

Relentless airstrikes and shelling have killed over 5,000 and displaced more than half a million people.

Faced with the threat of further sanctions, a volatile situation in neighboring Lebanon, and a brutally tough winter, the only thing currently rising from the embers of war-torn Syria is the value of the dollar against the struggling Syrian pound. This marks the beginning of a dangerous new phase in the Syrian conflict as the government, fresh from its eight-year-long war for survival, tries to fend off an economic collapse from within. 

With its clash with Syrian forces on Feb. 3, Turkey is being forced to realize that it has very limited leverage over its foreign policy priorities.

If Turkish efforts to stop the regime’s advance on Saraqeb fail, the humanitarian crisis will escalate uncontrollably.

The escalating tensions between Turkey and Russia over Idlib did not come as a surprise to many outside the Turkish capital.

While proclamations of ISIS’s defeat were certainly premature, international policy and attention on countering terrorism in Syria has since declined — as if to suggest that the job is done. In fact, as 2020 sets in, the world seems to be getting counter-terrorism all wrong in Syria, in three interlinked ways.

Iran and the U.S. were on a collision course as soon as President Donald Trump arrived at the White House in January 2017.

By any objective standard, the Lebanese protest movement has failed. This is not necessarily an indictment against it. Rather, it’s a reality one cannot and should not ignore. The responsible thing to do now is to try to understand why it has fallen flat, despite more than 100 days of demonstrations in various regions of the country including the capital, Beirut. 

First, a word of solace. In the annals of history, the Lebanese are in good company as most uprisings and revolutions failed to attain their goals. And even when they did, success either didn’t last long or was completely reversed due to counterrevolutions and other spoilers, both foreign and domestic.

Over the past several weeks geopolitical experts have been talking a lot about what the surprise U.S. drone attack on Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, head of the IRGC – Quds Force, on Jan. 3 means for the Middle East and relations between the major powers. What has received considerably less attention, however, is what Soleimani’s killing means for the South Caucasus, a region whose small size belies its strategic importance.

How did the Islamic Republic of Iran’s dominant narratives over labor evolve since the 1979 revolution? What paved the way to neoliberal discourses, particularly since the 1990s? Which processes and legal measures made workers precarious? What role did workers play, and along which lines did they develop their trajectories of resistance? These questions are at the core of this article, which explores the above-mentioned issues from two different vantage points: a top-down approach, which looks at official narratives, as well as the legal strategies that contribute to the precarization of workers; and a bottom-up perspective, which seeks to understand workers’ practices of resistance and counter-hegemonic actions.

Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani was on Israel’s “most wanted” list for more than a decade. Israeli intelligence identified him as a looming threat early in his career, and with time he outperformed even the graver threat predictions, as he systematically built the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (IRGC) Quds Force into a formidable regional stealth operation. Soleimani was a highly sophisticated executioner of Iran’s long-term strategy, which can be described as an effort to build a “double crescent.”