In the week before the inauguration each member of President Donald Trump’s cabinet underwent Senate hearings. As soon-to-be Secretaries and Directors, they were asked to defend their positions on not just a handful of minor issues, but on some of the President’s most contentious foreign policy positions.

The Syrian military declared on September 20, 2016 that the seven-day, U.S. -Russian brokered ceasefire was over as the government and opposition exchanged accusations over who was responsible for the violations and mounting violence that followed. The United States, and much of the West, claim that it was the deadly bombing of an aid convoy by Russian warplanes that officially ended the Syrian ceasefire.

The historic ratification, made on September 3rd by the United States and China, comes less than a year after 195 countries agreed at the 21st Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to limit the global temperature increase to no more than 2℃.

Acting out of self-preservation: how can we understand the U.S. failure to intervene in the 1994 Genocide?

It is no secret that President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been desperately trying to close down Guantanamo Bay, the American military prison and detention centre in Cuba, since taking office in January 2009. The first detainees arrived at Guantanamo Bay on 11 January 2002 under the command of former U.S.

The Iran Deal, customarily known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), is the international agreement between Iran, the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, and the European Union (EU). The deal was formally agreed upon on 14 July 2015 and officially implemented on 16 January 2016.

Security fears in Europe have substantially heightened, especially after 130 people were killed in the November 2015 Paris terrorist attacks. The attacks, beyond sending shockwaves across Europe and around the world, have called into question how best to track and monitor people arriving in Europe as part of the largest and most overwhelming migrant crisis experienced since the Second World War.

In the last month and a half alone, 7 October 2015 to today, six suicide bombings, claimed by the Islamic State (IS) have occurred.

My curiosity in the nature of the men powering the Islamic State (IS), grew out of a line from Philip Zimbardo’s book, The Lucifer Effect. In this book, Zimbardo asks whether suicide bombers are “mindless fanatics or mindful martyrs?”. (2011:291). This quote was in reference to a 2004 study of al-Qaeda members by psychiatrist Marc Sageman, who found evidence of the normality of youths turned suicide bombers.