Speaking at a recent Chatham House event former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright was asked her predictions for the Middle East. Ignoring the continued flux of both the Arab Spring the bloody civil war in Syria Albright responded that the modern relationship between Turkey and the Kurds is evidence...

Over 16 months into the unrest in Syria and still a true picture of events on the ground is hard to ascertain. Partly this is due to events moving so fast. The conflict, inspired by the regional Arab Spring, was sparked by children writing graffiti on the walls in the...

"The Battle for the Arab Spring - Revolution, Counter-Revolution and the making of a new era"

(Lin Noueihed and Alex Warren, Yale University Press, 2012)

Reuters correspondent Lin Noueihed and Middle East analyst Alex Warren have written an comprehensive account of the revolution and counter-revolution underpinning the Arab Spring...

The international community knows that the situation is bad and getting worse but lacks the unity and political capital to do anything about it

When will we arrive at a tipping point in Syria? This is the frequently asked question that followed the early momentum of the uprising in 2011,...

Revolt: Eye-Witness to the Syrian Uprising

One of the biggest challenges to understanding events in Syria over the past year has been the lack of access granted to the international media. The secretive nature of the Syrian state has allowed only for controlled and largely regulated trips...

In an ideal world the makers of the latest alien invasion blockbuster want you to watch the film, buy the board game and then join the US Navy.

The film has been fairly compared to the Transformers trilogy and is complete with sweeping shots of military hardware and a...

The heady optimism of 2011 and the rapid fall of the regimes of Gaddafi, Mubarak and Ben Ali, has been replaced by disappointment in the new military leadership in Cairo, deep divisions in Libya and of course the continued brutal clampdown against protestors in Syria. Western public's confidence in the...

It was not Facebook, Twitter or YouTube that brought down Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian people did that. But this does not mean that social media and internet�based technologies played no role, or that their role was insignificant, as some have alleged. Rather, events in Egypt and countries across the Middle...

Four days after the official US troop presence ended, Baghdad has been struck by bombings that are a reminder that for ordinary Iraqis the horror continues.

Soft, unprotected civilian targets were hit by co-ordinated, simultaneous attacks that were likely planned prior to Shi'a Prime Minister Maliki's Monday decision to...

The death toll continues to rise in Syria where nearly seven months of violence has led to the deaths of over 3,000 civilians. The UN Security Council, hit by a double veto from China and Russia earlier in the month, are divided and powerless. Ban Ki-Moon told reporters in Switzerland...