Stories of youths travelling to Syria to participate in the struggle against the Assad regime continue to make headlines in Belgium. Like that of 18-year-old J.B., a once average teenager who converted to Islam at the age of 15 before radicalising under the influence of the recently dissolved organization Sharia4Belgium. In February of this year, [...]

Rape and other acts of serious sexual violence in armed conflict are to be recognised as grave breaches of the Geneva Convention as well as war crimes, according to an announcement by British Foreign Secretary, William Hague and UN Special Envoy Angelina Jolie, at a G8 meeting on April 11th 2013. The new Declaration on Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict agreed [...]

It is widely accepted that transitional justice can and should be separated from politics. How societies and states achieve justice in the wake of mass atrocities, so it goes, is a pursuit that must be divorced from political calculations. Indeed, in the eyes of many, politics is poison to any attempt at achieving accountability and [...]

LOS ANGELES – Since Syria’s civil war erupted, its large chemical-weapons arsenal has haunted the conflict zone and beyond. Now Israel says that chemical weapons have been used by the Syrian regime. Escalating fears have driven US President Barack Obama to declare repeatedly that any Syrian use or transfer of chemical weapons would cross a [...]

ISTANBUL – Conflict in the Middle East threatens not only the security of many of its states, but also their continued existence. Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and others, now gripped by sectarian fighting, risk fragmenting into ethnic sub-states, transforming a region whose political geography was drawn nearly a century ago. Surveying the regional scene, Turkish Prime [...]