Human Rights

From international security and regional study to global challenges, CSIS experts will address many of the world's most difficult policy concerns and critical questions in 2012. To kick off the new year, we asked 25 of our scholars to identity what worries them most and what are the biggest opportunities in their respective areas of study.

Why should Hillary Clinton go to Myanmar? The short answer is to encourage the best chance at real political change in a country that effectively cloistered itself under harsh military rule for nearly five decades. Myanmar, or Burma, has been the virtual political ball and chain of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which it joined in 1997.

Many in the United States—and in the Middle East—worry that religious extremists in the Arab world are on the cusp of something big. Across the region, groups that blend religion and politics are injecting more religion into more open politics.

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has been spared the unrest that recently swept many of its neighbors in the Middle East.

A Warning for Bosnia
Excerpt "An insightful report just released by the U.S.-based Democratization Policy Council and the Sarajevo-based Atlantic Initiative issues a stern warning about renewed ethnic violence in Bosnia. The authors, who are seasoned Balkan analysts, are not predicting imminent violence, but their warnings need to be heeded by international actors who assume that the current status quo can last indefinitely."

President Obama announced on October 14 that he was sending approximately 100 military advisers to central Africa to assist in efforts to neutralize one of the continent’s most notorious rebel groups, the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).

Burma may be in the midst of the most significant political reform since the 1960s when the military seized control.  No one can be sure if these changes will take hold and how far they will go, but it is critical for the United States to recognize what is happening, encourage those pressing for change, and start to consider steps to help end the country’s decades of isolation.

Australian political scientist Hugh White’s argument that the coming century will be dominated by China and that, therefore, the most rational foreign policy course for Australia and others to follow would be to recognize China’s dominance and align their countries accordingly has a gaping blind spot.