This week has left me in a pensive mood. With the constant barrage of remembrance specials and slideshows in the media, even those of us…

Continue reading → Toward a New Light (The Mantle)

Somalia holds the unfortunate record of being the longest running failed state, going on twenty years without an established government. With the fall of President…

Continue reading → When We Don’t Learn From Our Failures: Famine in Somalia (The Mantle)

With the torture debate making its way back into the headlines in recent weeks, I have found myself sifting through old news clips and articles…

Continue reading → Our Obsession with Otherness Runs Deep (The Mantle)

As the story of the attacks in Norway unfolded last week, an incredible fiction emerged describing what sort of person could be responsible for such…

Continue reading → Obsessed with Otherness (The Mantle)

On March 24, 2005 the United Nations established the UN Mission in Sudan (UNMIS) in order to oversee the Comprehensive Peace Agreement (CPA). The hope…

Continue reading → Resigned to Damage Control: Time to Rethink Sudan (The Mantle)

The question of how and when the United States ought to be involved in international conflicts, particularly those in which we are not directly implicated,…

Continue reading → The Morality of Intervention: Living Up to Self-Imposed Labels (The Mantle)

Picture, if you will, a young boy walking home from school. He sees in the distance a car driving toward him. As the car pulls…

Continue reading → North Korea’s Not-so-Secret Prison Camps (The Mantle)

"Hundreds of thousands of people exist with virtually no rights, treated essentially as slaves, in some of the worst circumstances we've documented in the last…

Continue reading → North Korea’s Secretive Political Prison Camps