Sri Lankan ethnic Tamil women sit holding placards with portraits of their missing relatives as they protest outside a railway station in Colombo, Sri Lanka, April 6, 2015 (AP photo by Eranga Jayawardena).

JAFFNA, Sri Lanka—More than eight years have passed since Sri Lanka declared the end of its nearly three-decade long civil war. Since then, the small island-nation in the Indian Ocean has made significant progress. The country has remained mostly peaceful; tourists have started arriving in droves; and investors, especially from China, have started pouring billions into Sri Lanka, given its strategic location. And yet Sri Lanka’s march toward a stable, peaceful and prosperous future is threatened by two closely related problems: its hesitant approach to dealing with the events of the past, and its reluctance to tackle emerging tensions. In […]

A member of the U.S.-backed Syrian Democratic Forces walks inside a prison built by Islamic State fighters, Raqqa, Syria, Oct. 20, 2017 (AP photo by Asmaa Waguih).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series on the Islamic State after the fall of Raqqa and the outlook for Syria and its neighbors. What does the future of the Islamic State look like in the wake of its battlefield setbacks in Iraq and Syria, from the fall of Mosul last summer to Raqqa last month? Will it revert to a low-level insurgency, or lash out with the kinds of terrorist attacks more associated with its predecessors, like al-Qaida? Can it sustain itself as a movement drawing in sympathizers and recruits from around the world? Writing for […]

French President Emmanuel Macron, center right, and Burkina Faso’s president, Roch Marc Christian Kabore, center left, wave during a visit to a school in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, Nov. 28 , 2017 (AP photo by Ahmed Yempabou Ouoba).

After a first six months spent focused on matters domestic and European, French President Emmanuel Macron has begun to travel farther afield. He is in West Africa this week, having arrived yesterday in Burkina Faso and continuing on to Cote d’Ivoire and Ghana. Earlier this month he traveled to the Persian Gulf for a planned visit to the United Arab Emirates, making an unplanned stopover in Saudi Arabia on his way back to Paris. In West Africa, Macron will try, as all new French presidents must, to reset a relationship burdened by the historical legacy of colonial exploitation and postcolonial […]

A man takes pictures of blood stains of victims after masked gunmen ambushed a bus carrying Coptic Christians to a monastery, Maghagha, Egypt, May 27, 2017 (AP photo by Amr Nabil).

On Thursday, an assault on a Sufi mosque in Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula killed 305 worshippers in what officials have called the deadliest terrorist attack in modern Egyptian history. The staggering number of victims was a sign of the shifting nature of violence in which Egypt has been mired for nearly five years. Militants in Sinai who have waged an insurgency against the government are expanding their campaign to include not just agents of the state, but a rapidly growing number of civilians. The ongoing violence has weakened the position of the military-led regime of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who came […]

Presidential guards carry the coffin of a soldier killed in an ambush by ELN rebels, Bogota, Colombia, Oct. 29, 2015 (AP photo by Fernando Vergara).

In this week’s Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief, Judah Grunstein, senior editor, Frederick Deknatel, and associate editor, Omar H. Rahman, discuss what German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s precarious position in Berlin means for the European Union and the prospects for French President Emmanuel Macron’s own reform agenda. For the Report, James Bargent talks with Andrew Green about Colombia’s other peace process with the ELN guerrilla group and why it might prove even more challenging than the talks that recently ended the long war with the FARC insurgency. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines, as well as what you’ve […]

Demobilized ELN rebels wait in line to surrender their weapons at a military base, Tumaco, Colombia, April 3, 2009 (AP photo by William Fernando Martinez).

MEDELLIN, Colombia—The seven men arrived in the tiny hamlet of Carra, in the western Colombian state of Choco, just as darkness was falling on the evening of March 25. They were dressed in camouflage and were armed with rifles. According to witnesses, on their arms they wore bands bearing three letters: ELN, which stands for Ejercito de Liberacion Nacional, the National Liberation Army. Witnesses described how they shouted, threatened, smashed up boats and kicked over tables. They called the terrified residents “paracos”—slang for paramilitaries—as they searched the houses. And then they raised their rifles and opened fire. Four people died […]

Russian Deputy U.N. Ambassador Vladimir Safronkov raises his hand to vote against a resolution condemning Syria’s use of chemical weapons, U.N. headquarters, New York, April 12, 2017 (AP photo by Bebeto Matthews).

It is Cold War time at the United Nations again. Last week, Russia caused diplomatic uproar by vetoing not one, but two Security Council resolutions extending a U.N. investigation into the use of chemical weapons in Syria. Moscow is angry with the investigators for accusing the Syrian regime of using sarin gas and chlorine bombs. Russia has now used its veto 11 times to block resolutions over the Syrian war since 2011, four of them this year. Every veto sparks a ritualistic bout of outrage in the Security Council. All sides seemed especially tetchy last week. Nikki Haley, the U.S. […]

A Russian military policeman, left, rests in the lobby of a hospital in the city of Deir el-Zour, Syria, Sept. 15, 2017 (AP photo).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing series on the Islamic State after the fall of Raqqa and the outlook for Syria and its neighbors. In Syria, the self-proclaimed Islamic State, or ISIS, was always treated as a problem with an essentially military solution. At least for the U.S.-led international coalition, there was no positive end state or program of political change that could be joined to the military campaign against the jihadi group. The general repulsiveness of the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad meant that, unlike in neighboring Iraq, Washington and its allies could not simply invest […]

New recruits of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan train at their base, Koya, Iraq, Sept. 21, 2016 (AP photo by Maya Alleruzzo).

In late September, the Kurds of Iraq seemed to have moved one step closer to realizing their historic goal of gaining independence, when nearly 93 percent of voters backed a referendum to formally secede from Baghdad. Masoud Barzani, the former guerrilla leader who had served as president of the semiautonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, since 2005, went ahead with the poll despite fierce opposition from the governments of Iraq, Iran and Turkey, and mild opposition from the United States. When the results came in, Kurds took to the streets of Irbil, the regional capital, in celebration. It soon became […]

A drone model at a protest encampment near Creech Air Force Base outside Las Vegas, where people were demonstrating against remotely piloted armed drone missions in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, March 6, 2015 (AP photo by Steve Marcus).

America's wars will change as the enemies of tomorrow, whether extremist networks or hostile nations, acquire the ability to strike more directly at the United States. The way Americans think about armed conflict must evolve to incorporate this profound change to the nature of security. After the devastating Thirty Years War of the 17th century, the great powers of Europe narrowed their notion of what was acceptable in war. While seldom applying their new standards during often-brutal colonial conquests, the European powers—at least in wars among themselves—deemed it acceptable to kill enemy combatants but not civilians, to destroy enemy war […]