PORT SAID, EGYPT – Riots left more than 70 people dead after a soccer match between local teams Al-Ahly and Al-Masry. The police and Egyptian military are being blamed for not preventing the violence.

Analysts available for comment:

Abdallah Schleifer, Ph.D. is a veteran journalist who has covered the Middle East for American and Arab media for more than thirty years. He is Professor Emeritus at the American University in Cairo.

CONTACT: abdallah.schleifer@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Cairo, Egypt

Language: English

Joel Beinin, Ph.D., is a professor of Middle East History at Stanford Unviersity. He was formerly the director of Middle East Studies and professor of history at the American University in Cairo. His principal areas of research have been the histories of modern Egypt, Israel and Palestine, radical movements and minorities in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and US policy in the Middle East.

CONTACT: joel.beinin@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Stanford, U.S.A.

Languages: Arabic, English

Abdeslam Maghraoui is Associate Professor of Political Science at Duke University and a core faculty member at the Duke Islamic Studies Center. He focuses his research on religion, political reform and political violence in the Middle East and North Africa.

CONTACT: abdeslam.maghraoui@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Durham, U.S.A.

Languages: Arabic, English, French

Metsa Rahimi is a security intelligence analyst at Janusian Security Risk Management. Her work includes responding to security events in the Middle East and North Africa as they happen.

CONTACT: metsa.rahimi@theglobalexperts.org

Location: London, U.K.

Languages: English, French, Spanish

Francois Burgat, Ph.D. is a Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), France, and is posted at IREMAM (Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman) in Aix-en-Provence. He is a renowned political scientist and Arabist.

CONTACT: francois.burgat@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Provence, France

Languages: Arabic, English, French

The BBC has published excerpts from a secret NATO report which describe the Pakistan government’s support of the Taliban. Pakistan has dismissed the report.

Analysts available for comment:

Arabinda Acharya is research fellow and manager of strategic projects at the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is an expert on terrorism and conflict throughout the South Asia region.

CONTACT: arabinda.acharya@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Singapore

Language: English

Samina Ahmed, Ph.D. is South Director of the International Crisis Group. She oversees the group’s work in Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Nepal. Her team focuses on political, security and stability issues in South Asia, like Islamic extremism, domestic and regional terrorism, domestic insurgencies and the risk of inter-state conflict.

CONTACT: samina.ahmed@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Islamabad, Pakistan

Language: English, Urdu

Olivier Guillard is Asia Research Director for the Paris-based thinktank IRIS. His main tasks are to monitor political, military and strategic plans in Asia, including Afghanistan.

CONTACT: olivier.guillard@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Paris, France

Language: English, French

Will Hartley is Editor of IHS Jane’s Terrorism & Insurgency Center. He heads a US-based team responsible for collecting and analyzing terrorism and insurgency related open source intelligence, profiling currently active non-state armed groups and producing major terrorist incident reports.

CONTACT: will.hartley@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Washington D.C., USA

Language: English

Swadesh Rana is a Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute and former Chief of the Conventional Arms Branch in the UN Department of Disarmament Affairs.  Her current interest is in the modes of combat and tools of violence with a focus on South Asia.

CONTACT: swadesh.rana@theglobalexperts.org

Location: New York, USA

Language: Bangla, English, Hindi, Panjabi, Urdu

Amin Saikal is a leading authority on Afghanistan, and author of several books and papers, including Modern Afghanistan: A History of Struggle and Survival (2006).

CONTACT: amin.saikal@theglobalexperts.org

Location: Canberra, Australia

Language: English, Farsi, Pashto

Yet few ask one of the most pressing questions facing Daw Suu Kyi. How will she deal with the Rohingya?

“The Rohingya,” you will ask. “Who are they?”

The Rohingya, whom the BBC calls “one of the world’s most persecuted minority groups”, are the little-publicised and largely forgotten Muslim people of the coastal Rakhine state of western Myanmar. Their historic lineage in Rakhine dates back centuries, as fishermen and farmers. Over the past three decades, the Rohingya have been systematically driven out of their homeland by Myanmar’s military junta and subjected to widespread violence and the total negation of their rights and citizenship within Myanmar. They are a stateless Muslim minority.

The continued tragedy of the unrecognised Rohingya, both in Myanmar and as refugees abroad, casts a dark shadow over the bright hopes and prospects for democracy in a country plagued by violence and civil war. Suu Kyi is ideally placed to extend democratic reforms to all ethnic peoples, including the Rohingya, in a free Myanmar.

This article is the first in a series by Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, a former Pakistani high commissioner to the UK, exploring how a litany of volatile centre/periphery conflicts with deep historical roots were interpreted after 9/11 in the new global paradigm of anti-terrorism – with profound and often violent consequences.

Read the rest of the article on Al Jazeera’s website.

Recent terrorist atrocities have seemed to confirm this received idea. But if we want a peaceful world, we urgently need a more balanced view. We cannot hope to win the “battle for hearts and minds” unless we know what is actually in them. Nor can we expect Muslims to be impressed by our liberal values if they see us succumbing unquestioningly to a medieval prejudice born in a time of extreme Christian belligerence.

Like Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, Christians, Sikhs and secularists, some Muslims have undoubtedly been violent and intolerant, but the new exhibition at the British Museum – Haj: Journey to the Heart of Islam – is a timely reminder that this is not the whole story.

[...]

Alas, all traditions lose their primal purity and we all fail our founders. But the British Museum’s beautiful presentation of the Haj can help us understand how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their faith. The new exhibition can indeed become a journey to the heart of Islam and also, perhaps, to a more authentic and respectful Western rational identity.

Read the entire article on the Gulf Times website.

Islamist sect Boko Haram claimed responsibility for the bombing of three Nigerian churches on Christmas Day, as well as an earlier attack on the country’s U.N. headquarters.

Experts J. Peter Pham, Marc-Antoine Perouse de Montclos and Jeremy Binnie agree that the sect has gained prominence in recent years and aligned itself with other African Islamist groups.

Pham, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, tells Brazilian newspaper Correio Braziliense that the sect has undergone a “dramatic transformation” in the last three years, joining forces with the Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) and Somalia’s al-Shabab.

Perouse de Montclos and Binnie say that while Boko Haram has adopted attention-gaining tactics from other Islamist movements, its cause and ideology remain Nigerian.

“They have some serious problems with the consistency of their messaging,” says Jeremy Binnie, Middle East and Africa editor at Jane’s Defence Weekly, in a Reuters report.

“By their doctrine and beliefs in magic, activists Boko Haram, coming especially from the regions north-east, does not match the typical profile of the model Wahhabi Al Qaeda,” Perouse de Montclos, researcher at the Institute of Development Research, writes in Le Monde.

From an economic perspective, the sect’s bolder attacks are part of a pan-African Islamist threat that could hurt the continent’s development in 2012, says Pham in a blog post.

“Counterinsurgency campaigns are, at the very least, expensive affairs which divert resources from the investments in infrastructure, education, and health which Africa’s emerging economies need to make if they are position themselves to take advantage of the current growth opportunities.”

This is surely the question Western policymakers are asking themselves over the latest standoff between Iran and the United States.

With tensions rising in the Strait of Hormuz following Iran’s threat to blockade the waterway, and the U.S. insistence that this won’t be allowed to happen, it’s clear that unless Iran’s supreme leader achieves a quick victory through a sudden spike in oil prices, something which would likely pressure Barack Obama to cancel new sanctions on Iran, he could be compelled to act on the country’s threats.

With Iran’s currency tumbling, and a rise in oil prices uncertain, the likelihood of an Iranian backlash can’t be ignored.

[...] Clearly, the threat from a possible nuclear Iran must be addressed. But at the same time, Israel should be prepared to counter the asymmetric danger posed from a non-nuclear Iran, something far more likely than the much-discussed nuclear threat.

Judging from the country’s  severely exposed diplomatic flank, though, Israel looks sadly ill-prepared to meet that threat.

Read the entire article on The Diplomat’s website.