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Showing posts with the label geopolitical analysis

Trump’s UN Address: Coercive Diplomacy and the Escalation with Iran

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Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Trump’s UN address signals coercive diplomacy toward Iran, raising questions about escalation, deterrence, and the limits of pressure. Addressing the United Nations General Assembly , US President Donald Trump delivered a 37-minute speech that fused maximum-pressure rhetoric with a transactional timeline for regional diplomacy. Positioned between ongoing military friction in the Middle East and domestic political calculations, Trump framed Washington’s strategy toward Tehran in stark binary terms: total destruction or a sweeping economic deal. Beneath the theatrical ultimatum lies a complex geopolitical calculus where domestic American politics, multilateral institution-building, and high-tech defense priorities intersect. For Tehran and regional capitals, the address signals both the limits of American interventionism and the precarious window for post-election negotiations. +-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | ...
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About the Peshmerga unification: How Can We Have an Army?

Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj How can Kurdish society build a modern army while balancing history, politics, technology, civil authority, and the Peshmerga's legacy? This may appear to be a straightforward institutional question, but it is not. The question of how to create an army in the Kurdistan Region is ultimately a question about political authority, social organization, historical experience, technology, and the relationship between the state and the forces that defend it. At the most basic level, there are two ways of thinking about this problem. We might call them thin theories and deep theories. Thin theory assumes that institutions can be separated from the societies that produce them. Under this approach, armies are broadly comparable institutions that can be constructed according to common models in different places. The assumption is that what works in one environment can, with sufficient administrative effort, be reproduced somewhere else. A similar logic is particularly domina...
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America’s Kurdish Studies Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowledge

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  By Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj | Kurdish Policy Analysis Who Produces Knowledge About the Kurds? America’s Kurdish Studies Infrastructure and the Politics of Knowledge For much of the modern history of Kurdish studies, the central question was whether the Kurds could be studied at all. Today, the question is different. Kurdish language courses exist at American universities. Dedicated Kurdish political studies programs have emerged. Major research universities host Kurdish lectures, language circles, archives, dissertations and conferences. Libraries hold Kurdish-language materials, while scholars working on Kurdish politics, history, anthropology, literature, archaeology and language have become part of a wider academic field. The more consequential question, therefore, is not simply whether knowledge about the Kurds is being produced. It is where that knowledge is produced, through which institutions, in which languages, by whom, for which audiences, and according to which intellectual ...
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John L. Esposito’s Unfinished Reckoning with Orientalism: Beyond Post-Orientalism?

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  John Esposito challenged Orientalism but left an unfinished question about Islam, the modern state, and the limits of post-Orientalist thought. Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj John L. Esposito, arguably the most influential American scholar of Islam of his generation, died on 15 July 2026 at the age of 86, bringing to a close a scholarly career that spanned more than five decades. Few American academics did more to challenge the representation of Islam as an inherently threatening, irrational, or politically incompatible tradition. Esposito spent much of his career confronting precisely the assumptions that had shaped Western scholarship and public discourse about Islam, particularly in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution, the Rushdie affair, 9/11, and the rise of the so-called “clash of civilizations.” His death has therefore generated a deserved wave of recognition, including Nader Hashemi’s description of him as a scholar who “transformed how the West understood Islam,” while Tamara So...
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The Gulf’s strategic chokepoint crisis | Kurdish Policy Analysis

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  Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Iran face a widening struggle over pipelines, Hormuz and Bab al-Mandab, reshaping Gulf geopolitics and energy security. The Middle East is entering a more dangerous phase of the Iran–Gulf confrontation in which the central strategic issue is no longer simply the exchange of missiles and drones, but the control of the region’s energy and maritime arteries . In the space of days, Saudi Arabia has faced attacks launched from Iraqi territory against its East-West oil pipeline, Qatar has publicly backed Riyadh’s restraint, Iran and the Gulf states are preparing another diplomatic effort in Oman, and Iran-aligned Houthi forces have seized strategically important territory around the Bab al-Mandab Strait. Taken together, these developments reveal an emerging regional contest over whether energy can continue to move through the Gulf and Red Sea despite the wider war. The most consequential development for Iraq and the Gulf is the reported drone a...
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Lindsey Graham Passing Reshapes Republican Foreign Policy—and Raises Questions for the Kurds

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  By Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj | Kurdish Policy Analysis The sudden death of one of Washington's most influential Republican hawks removes a powerful congressional advocate for Ukraine, Israel, a hardline Iran policy, and Kurdish aspirations in the Middle East. The death of Senator Lindsey Graham removes one of Washington's strongest advocates for the Kurds, Ukraine, Israel, and a tougher US policy toward Iran. Lindsey Graham's Sudden Death Leaves a Strategic Void in Washington WASHINGTON — Senator Lindsey Graham , one of the Republican Party's most influential foreign policy voices and one of President Donald Trump's closest congressional allies, has died at the age of 71 following a sudden illness, according to a statement released by his office. His unexpected death comes at a particularly volatile moment in American and Middle Eastern politics. Graham had recently traveled to Ukraine, remained deeply involved in congressional debates over Iran and Israel, and was p...
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Kurdistan in the emerging world order: from autonomy to strategic agency | Kurdish Policy Analysis

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 Dr. Pshtiwan Faraj Kurdistan must turn geopolitical importance into strategic agency as the global order shifts toward multipolarity, competition and transactional power. The international order is changing, but the most important question is not whether the existing order is “collapsing.” The more consequential question is which institutions, practices and power relationships will replace the assumptions that governed international politics after the Cold War. A recent English School analysis of the emerging world order offers an important framework for understanding this transformation by examining changes in the balance of power, diplomacy, the use of force, great-power management and the global market.  For Kurdistan, this debate is not an abstract argument among international relations scholars. The Kurdistan Region of Iraq has spent three decades developing political autonomy within an international environment shaped by American primacy, European engagement, regional ...
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