|
|
|
|
|
Saturday, April 23, 2016
 We are excited to announce the availability of FPRI’s 60th Anniversary Collections on Amazon Kindle. These edited volumes, produced by each of our research programs, are meant to provide the reader -- at a very low cost -- with a taste of the quality analysis we produced on a diverse array of topics over the past decade. Find each of them here:
Other FPRI E-Books will soon be added to this platform.
|
|
New Publications
 FPRI's Baltic Initiative is pleased to post three new Baltic Bulletins:
Chris Miller, Editor
April 2016
 Saddam Did Not Create ISIS
Samuel Helfont, Robert A. Fox Fellow, FPRI
Foreign Affairs, April 21, 2016
Within the Middle East studies community and the national security community, there is an ongoing debate over the origins of ISIS. One aspect of the debate was kicked off a few months ago by Kyle Orton in the NY Times who argued that its origins can be traced to Saddam Hussein's adoption of Islamist ideology during the last years of his rule. FPRI's Robert A. Fox Fellow Sam Helfont and his colleague Michael Brill disputed this idea in Foreign Affairs, relying on their work reviewing many of the millions of Iraqi government and Baath Party documents captured in Iraq in 2003. Earlier this month, the prominent Israeli scholar of Iraq Amatzia Baram wrote a lengthy response to Helfont and Brill, also in the pages of Foreign Affairs, drawing on his recent book on Saddam. This week, Foreign Affairs has published Helfont and Brill's response to Baram. The series of exchanges is illuminating and all the earlier articles are hyperlinked in this latest contribution to the debate.
 Weakened America Reaps What it Sows
Mackubin Thomas Owens, Senior Fellow, FPRI
Providence Journal, April 19, 2016
"The Obama administration’s explicit decision to disengage from the world is based on the faulty assumption that our friends would step forward as the United States retrenched."
 Let’s End America’s Hopeless War for the Middle East
Andrew Bacevich, Board of Editors, Orbis
Politico Magazine, April 3, 2016
"To reflect on this longest of American wars—why it goes on and on, and at such a cost of blood and treasure—is to confront two questions. First, why has the world’s mightiest military achieved so little even while absorbing very considerable losses and inflicting even greater damage on the subjects of America’s supposed beneficence? Second, why in the face of such unsatisfactory outcomes has the United States refused to chart a different course?"
 The Arab World (Finally!) Proclaims Hezbollah a Terrorist Organization
Tally Helfont, Director, FPRI's Program on the Middle East
FPRI E-Notes, April 14, 2016
"But the real question is, what took so long for Hezbollah to be revealed as the wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing that it has always been? And what’s more, why now? The answers lie in the perfect storm that has emerged in the post-Arab uprisings period in which Iran’s expansive, destabilizing ambitions have gone too far to remain uncontested by the Arab World..."
This article was originally published in Arabic by Al Majala, and republished by Asharq al-Awsat.
|
|
FPRI Scholars in the News
 FPRI Senior Fellow Sean Yom Quoted in Al-Monitor on Jordan
April 18, 2016
“The Jordanian leadership has to address its immediate interests in a way that makes the other actor feel satisfied, but that does not lead to a very consistent overall foreign policy.”
 FPRI's James McGann Quoted in the New York Times on Think Tanks
April 16, 2016
“There is a generation of new donors who have huge assets, and their own ideas, and think traditional think tanks are old-fashioned.”
 FPRI's Eric Trager Quoted on CNN on Egypt
April 20, 2016
"This government believes all political turmoil is a foreign conspiracy driven by foreign funding, not driven by something organic within Egyptian society."
|
|
FPRI Bookshelf
Welcome to the FPRI Bookshelf! In this new section of our weekly insights we will be highlighting recent and upcoming books by our scholars.
 Dreams of a Great Small Nation
Kevin McNamara, Senior Fellow, FPRI
PublicAffairs, March 2016
Publisher’s Weekly calls McNamara’s book a “captivating narrative history . . . McNamara proves to be a great storyteller."
 Aid for Elites: Building Partner Nations and Ending Poverty through Human Capital
Mark Moyar, Senior Fellow, FPRI
Cambridge University Press, March 7, 2016
"Drawing on a wealth of examples from around the world, the author shows that foreign aid can be made much more effective by focusing it on human capital development. Training, education, and other forms of assistance can confer both skills and cultural attributes on current and future leaders, especially those responsible for security and governance."
Mark also wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal derived from his book which can be found here.
 Communitarian Foreign Policy: Amitai Etzioni's Vision
Nikolas K. Gvosdev, Senior Fellow, FPRI
Transaction Publishers, December 3, 2015
This volume establishes Amitai Etzioni’s communitarian approach to international relations as a distinct school of American foreign policy thought. Nikolas K. Gvosdev systematically evaluates Etzioni’s ideas, tracing their origins during the Cold War and their relevance to current challenges in Asia and the Middle East, and considers their strengths and weaknesses.
 The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China
Edited by Jacque deLisle, Director, FPRI's Asia Program; Avery Goldstein, Senior Fellow, FPRI; and Guobin Yang, Associate Professor of Communication and Sociology, University of Pennsylania
University of Pennsylvania Press, March 8, 2016
“The Internet, Social Media, and a Changing China is the first book-length study of the Chinese Internet after the social media revolution that completely changed the contours and possibilities of Chinese cyberspace. The individual chapters provide a diverse range of empirical and conceptual insights, and, taken as a whole, the volume stands alongside the major publications in the field.”—Jonathan Sullivan, University of Nottingham
|
|
Appointments
 FPRI appoints Eriks Selga as Associate Fellow of its Eurasia Program
Selga is an LL.M. candidate at Temple University. His research interests focus on the legal issues surrounding citizenship and cybersecurity in the Baltic States. Eriks holds an LL.B. from the Riga Graduate School of Law.
|
|
Events in the Week Ahead
Stanley and Arlene Ginsburg Lecture Series
 An Exploration of the “Anthropocene”: The Impact of Humans on Planet Earth
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
This talk considers the concept of the Anthropocene, a geologic era defined by human influence. The arrival and evolution of humanity disrupted 300 million years of prior history. How do we comprehend humanity’s place and potential in the biosphere? This is subject to great debate among scientists and social scientists alike. A significant participant in this debate is John McNeill, who teaches world history and environmental history at Georgetown University. He is author of the forthcoming book The Great Acceleration: An Environmental History of the Anthropocene since 1945 (Harvard University Press, 2016).
|
|
Audio/Video of Past Events
Main Line Breakfast Briefings
 The Rebalance within Asia: The Challenges Ahead for Japan in a New Regional Order
April 20, 2016
Japan remains the world’s third-largest economy, but its political clout has not matched its economic status. At the same time, China’s rapid militarization and growing political aspirations, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, and heightening economic rivalries and growing nationalism in East Asia are reshaping the landscape of the Asia-Pacific. Japan’s security and economic policy choices will play a key role in shaping the future of the world’s most populous region. What is Japan’s likely trajectory? How will it impact the region? And what are the implications for the United States? To address these questions, we featured Shihoko Goto, a fellow of the Mansfield Foundation/Japan Foundation U.S.-Japan Network for the Future. Prior to joining the Wilson Center, she spent over ten years as a journalist writing about the international political economy with an emphasis on Asian markets. She is a former correspondent for Dow Jones News Service and United Press International based in Tokyo and Washington.
Partner Events
 What to Do About ISIS?
April 17, 2016
This year we offered a new format featuring a discussion moderated by WHYY’s Marty Moss-Coane, with guests Trudy Rubin, the renowned columnist of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Clint Watts, FPRI’s own “online jihadi hunter” and Robert A. Fox Fellow. In this discussion, we explored the threat posed by ISIS at home and abroad, the interconnection with the Syrian civil war, the phenomenon of foreign fighters, and the question of radicalization.
Butcher History Institute
 America's Entry into World War I
April 9-10, 2016
Taking advantage of the flood of new work unleashed by the centenary of the outbreak of the war, our goal is to introduce teachers to the most current scholarly discussions and also to help them prepare lesson plans to teach the upcoming centenary of American entry into the war in 2017. Each topic offers a crucial case study in understanding the larger context of the war, its impact on the United States, and the relationship of the United States to shaping the postwar world.
|
|
 Founded in 1955, the Foreign Policy Research Institute is dedicated to bringing the insights of scholarship to bear on the foreign policy and national security challenges facing the United States. It seeks to educate the public, teach teachers, train students, and offer ideas to advance U.S. national interests based on a nonpartisan, geopolitical perspective that illuminates contemporary international affairs through the lens of history, geography, and culture.
To keep up with FPRI daily, be sure to follow us on Twitter @fprinews and
Like us on Facebook -- joining our more than 200,000 fans worldwide!
For more information, contact Eli Gilman at 215-732-3774, ext. 103, email fpri@fpri.org, or visit us at www.fpri.org.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
