Harvard students from Turkey and Syria are scrambling to learn fates of family and friends and raise awareness and funds for aid and recovery. Read the full story in the Harvard Gazette.

"COVID-19 has shown that atypical, transnational security issues need to be taken seriously. Man-made threats are not the only forces that can devastate the globe and fundamentally disrupt daily life," writes second-year Center for Middle Eastern Studies AM student Margaret Dene, in an article for the Foreign Policy Research Institute, where she is a summer Research Associate. Read the complete article on the Foreign Policy...

Within a few years of the historic Arab uprisings of 2011, popular mobilization dissipated amidst instability in many Arab countries. We trace the relationship between shifting macro-political conditions and individual-level political values in the Middle East, demonstrating that a preference for democracy and political trust are not fixed cultural features of populations but rather can shift rapidly in the face of perceived insecurity. Our empirical analyses employ longitudinal data from the Arab Barometer covering 13 countries and data from the 2015 World Values Survey, which includes...

About 11 million Syrians have fled their homes since the outbreak of a civil war in 2011 – including a family that settled in Silver Spring. To bring awareness to the eight-year anniversary of the conflict’s beginning, the brother-sister duo of Mouhanad Al-Rifay and CMES AM candidate Oula Alrifai are screening their documentary about child refugees from their home country this month in the town that took them in 13 years ago. “Tomorrow’s Children,” released in 2018, was directed by Al-...