It’s been a great week. The program in Wroclaw included Polish language classes and lectures on Polish history, sociology and art. I had an amazing Polish teacher who was always so enthusiastic and excited. It…
Well this has been a very interesting week. On Wednesday Fulbright Orientation began in Warsaw. We started at the US Embassy in Warsaw. We have quite an interesting and diverse group of Fulbrighters. There are…
Flying across the world is certainly exhausting under the best of circumstances. In my case I was so wound up about leaving that the night before we flew out I only slept about 45 minutes…
My name is Ryan Boudwin. I am twenty-seven years old. I am a former police officer and a non-traditional student that completed an undergraduate degree in international relations at American Public University by studying part-time…
Intervention in internal conflicts is a nasty business, often with many unforeseen consequences. Such intervention is frequently unsuccessful. Such intervention often fails because intervening troops have an inadequate mandate, their forces are not sufficiently armed,…
The former Soviet republic Belarus has yet to achieve meaningful democratization. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described it as “the last remaining true dictatorship in Europe” (CNN 2005). Since President Alexander Lukashenko took power in…
Not all jihadists are created equal. Some have proven far more capable of adapting their strategies to fit the situation on the ground than others. Islamist organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas,…
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an example of a conflict without much hope for resolution. The Holy Land has been the site of vicious ethnic conflict for thousands of years, and the Israeli-Palestinian impasse is but…
Russias party system was extremely fragmented in the 1990s, with electoral volatility at an all time high and large numbers of politicians who achieved victory without party affiliation (Gel’man 2008, 913-914). As Russia’s system of…
Dmitri Rogozin, the Russian envoy to NATO, speaking of a NATO defense plan for the Baltic states, recently asked, “Against who else could such a defense be intended? Against Sweden, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, against polar…