The ongoing 'Arab Winter' is showing that there was always more than dictatorships to blame forthe Arab world's malaise. Popular protests across the Arab world in early 2011, which led to the overthrow of deeply entrenched authoritarian dictatorships, were warmly welcomed around the world.

Algeria has the potential to emerge from the Arab Spring as a regional power. This may be good news for western states, but it's bad new for Arab revolutionaries. In the context of the Arab Spring, or Arab Winter, much attention has been paid to those states seen to be exerting influence from behind the scenes

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia’s influence in the Middle East has been greatly undermined and its policy has changed in emphasis and intensity. While during the clash between the two superpowers – the US and the Soviet Union – the Middle East was part of its ideological battlefield

Humanitarian interventions are not a passing fad, but a genie that is now well and truly out of its bottle for good, to the horror of the remaining dictators in the world. There are many reasons why humanitarian interventions aren’t going away any time soon.

Human rights are universal, but they are yet to be universalised. Transparent sovereignty is the answer. Whilst being a legalistic term that tends to evoke groans, apprehensive of impending, inevitable boredom, the word ‘sovereignty’ is central to any debate on whether humanitarian intervention in the internal affairs of a State is appropriate or justifiable.

I had the opportunity to meet Evan Davis, director of “It’s a Girl,” a documentary about the global atrocity of female genocide. We had both attended the same conference and began talking during the ‘meet and greet’ time

Who could have foreseen that Libya, within just one year of Muammar Gaddafi’s death, would join the community of democratic nations? Virtually everyone predicted that the Islamist tide would sweep through Tripoli as it had done through Tunis and Cairo. But it was not to be. Instead, the Libyan people made fools of us all.

The U.S. will become the world's largest producer of oil before 2020, a net oil exporter by 2030, and will achieve energy self-sufficiency by 2035. In light of pending energy self-sufficiency, a change in U.S. foreign policy towards the Middle East should not come as a surprise