The RAND Corporation has opened a new office in Abu Dhabi, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, as part of a strategic effort to deliver research and analysis to decisionmakers in the Middle East, RAND President and CEO James A. Thomson announced today.
The highly sophisticated Stuxnet computer worm suspected of sending Iran's nuclear centrifuges into self-destruction mode forces a difficult debate on whether longstanding firewalls in our country's democracy should be breached for the sake of national security, writes Isaac Porche.
Given domestic pressures and intra-Arab rivalries, all Arab states hedge in their policies toward Iran, seeking to rein in Iranian influence but also being mindful of the permanence of Iranian power and the costs of antagonizing it, writes Dalia Dassa Kaye.
Deradicalizing Islamist extremists may be even more important than getting them to simply disengage from terrorist activities, according to a new RAND Corporation study that examines counter-radicalization programs in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Europe.
Some Turkish commentators have written off Obama as a lame duck and advised the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan government to begin reconsidering relations in the post-election period. However, foreign policy played virtually no role in the election, writes F. Stephen Larrabee.
The Arc, a proposed high-speed transportation infrastructure corridor linking urban centers within and between the West Bank and Gaza, won two major prizes at the 2010 World Architecture Festival held in Barcelona November 3-5, 2010.
Ahmadinejad, who has been opposed by the reformists and the pragmatic conservatives, is increasingly viewed as a divisive figure even within the principlist (fundamentalist) camp, writes Alireza Nader.
One can legitimately argue for reducing the United States' commitment to the Afghan war, but it makes no sense to denigrate the tactics and techniques best designed to counter an insurgency, writes James Dobbins.
We have come through wars, depressions, natural and man-made disasters, indeed higher levels of domestic terrorist violence than that we face today, writes Brian Michael Jenkins.
Piracy is a crime at sea, but it starts on land. To thwart the Somali piracy career path, the world community should put funds toward protecting local fishing grounds and building a national coast guard capability in Somalia, writes Peter Chalk.
Washington would be wise to work closely with Britain and France to ensure that their budget cuts do not threaten how the allies will, together, address common threats and security challenges, write F. Stephen Larrabee and Peter A. Wilson.
The Afghan government and NATO can improve security in Afghanistan by leveraging traditional policing institutions in rural villages and mobilizing the population against insurgents, according to a new RAND Corporation study.
Good counterinsurgency practices tend to "run in packs" and whether a campaign includes more good practices than bad ones is a strong predictor of the outcomes of campaigns historically, according to a new study from the RAND Corporation.
The Afghan government has embarked on a high-stakes gamble: Try to negotiate with the leaders of the various insurgent networks to end the nine-year-old Afghan war. The notion of the Kabul government cutting a deal with the Taliban is fiercely controversial, write Wali Shaaker and John Parachini.
President Obama's declaration last week that a change in personnel will not mean a change in policy suggests that the administration took only some of the lessons contained in Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article, writes Celeste Ward Gventer.
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