Members of the Turkish Foreign Ministry’s Strategic Research Center will discuss Turkish Foreign Policy in the Middle East in the context of the Arab Spring. They will try to shed light on the factors that influenced Turkey's response to the democratic uprisings of the last three years, with special emphasis on the Syrian case. The Strategic Research Center is the Ministry's in-house think-tank to establish channels of communication between policy makers and the academic and research community. It also works as a consultative body to provide foreign policy decision makers with scholarly assessments of relevant issues and reviews Turkish foreign policy with a future perspective.

The Islam in Eurasia Policy Conference combined the latest scholarship and informed discussion of the critical issues facing the U.S. Government in this key part of the world as 2014 approaches. It was the culminating event of a multiyear research project supported by Carnegie Corporation.

“The Arab Spring in Comparative Perspective: Dramatic Transitions in Recent Decades” conference took place on June 4th and 5th in Washington, D.C., co-organized by American University’s School of International Service, the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, and the Woodrow Wilson Center for International Scholars’ Brazil Institute, Global Europe Program, Mexico Institute, and Middle East Studies Program. The aim of this initial workshop was to consider dramatic transitional experiences in Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Eastern Europe and included a series of panels examining specific facets of transitional experiences: constitutional developments (including democratic reforms); economic and social affairs; justice and human rights issues; the evolving experiences of women; external pressures and interventions. In each case, a commentator with expertise on the Middle East and North Africa was asked to reflect on the possible relevance of other “transitional” experiences to understanding the dynamics and prospects of the “Arab Spring.” These reflections also served as the primary task of the workshop’s concluding Round Table discussion.

European integration is the result of a series of policy initiatives with strong voluntaristic features. By far the most important of those initiatives was the adoption of the euro as a common currency for the 17 countries-members of the euro zone. The European edifice was designed for normal conditions and not for crisis situations. The budgetary and financial crisis of the recent years led necessarily to the adoption of an extraordinary system of economic governance of the euro area with entirely intergovernmental- and not community- features. While the countries in crisis are predominantly in the European South, Evangelos Venizelos, President of PASOK, argues that the notion of the European South is a political and not a geographic concept.