The attack on the school in Peshawar in December shocked the world. In Pakistan, the upshot is a growing military shadow once more looming over a fragile democracy.
It’s been a year of searing images of horrifying mass civilian injury and death, from Gaza to eastern Ukraine. The world must set standards to curb resort to weapons with wide-area effects where many civilians are at risk.
Hannah Arendt would have called it the 'banality of evil'—how Islamic State dresses up medieval misogyny as divine direction.
The Peshawar atrocity did not come out of a clear blue sky—the foreboding context an inert, corrupt state ambivalent towards violence, hardly functioning public institutions and unregulated madrasas.
In theory, Pakistan’s constitution upholds equality of all its citizens, regardless of religion. In theory.
With Kurds in Iraq and Syria under attack from the Islamic State, many young Kurds in Europe have been joining resistance forces—a trend occluded by the media focus on European-born jihadists.
European governments risk adopting the same counter-productive approaches towards the latest Islamist groups and fighters as they did against al-Qaeda.
The Federally Administered Tribal Areas touching Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan suffer a toxic mix of state and non-state violence and neglect. The consequences are unlikely to be good.
Honduras' perfect storm of machismo, repression, corruption and impunity make it the murder capital of the world.
The latest Boko Haram atrocity in Nigeria will not be the last. The incapacity of the state and looming elections mean more violence can be expected.
The International Criminal Court is often presented as "racist" in Africa because of its focus on indictees from the continent. But the problem lies elsewhere.
The law of unintended effects is in evidence as the rise of Islamic State threatens a potential resolution of Turkey's Kurdish question.
