Syria in crisis: the harrowing case of Aleppo

The city of Aleppo is a key battleground in the Syrian civil war and has seen intense fighting since 2012. On Tuesday morning, the city fell to government forces amidst claims of severe human rights abuses and deteriorating conditions on the ground. Throughout the conflict, the city has been split between two major warring factions: the pro-Assad forces, backed by Russia, Iran and other Shia groups, holding the western part of the city, and the Syrian rebel groups, backed by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and the United States, claiming the east. Other groups, including armed terrorist factions and Kurdish militias, are also involved in the conflict and maintain smaller territory throughout the city. Reports claim that the Kurds have been cooperating with the Assad regime to oust rebel groups from the city

Refugees and the Failure of the State: A Comparative Look at Modern Protection Gaps in Iraq and Guatemala

Mark MillerThis project attempts to dissect the relationship between the nation-state system and the modern refugee regime. I assess the reluctance of the refugee regime to fully embrace victims of non-traditional factors and the roots of these policies in nation-state dynamics. By looking at the origins of the modern refugee law, I hope to shed light on some of the problems plaguing the international protection systems. By utilizing modern case studies ??? one in Central America and one in the Middle East ??? I hope to highlight the shortcomings of these systems. The current refugee laws were created in the middle of the twentieth century at a time of heightened nationalism when European ideals dominated international discourse. Because of this, Western principles are engrained in the international perception of the refugee. I argue that international global politics have taken on a hypocritical posture rooted in these western ideals. Nationalist movements oust minority groups creating refugees throughout the world. Furthermore, strong nationalistic ideals have led to xenophobic policies and tightened borders, leaving refugees caught in a stateless limbo for years. A narrow-minded and deeply western focus on the need to protect all citizens of the world from state over-reach has created a system that is only slowly acknowledging the existence of non-state or private persecution. It is through these paradoxical lenses that I research the refugee and the state system from which they find themselves excluded.Political Scienc

Electrophysiological correlates of adaptive control and attentional engagement in patients with first episode schizophrenia and healthy young adults

The goal of this study was to investigate the neural dynamics of error processing and post-error adjustments in cognitive control and attention to a cognitive task in schizophrenia. We adopted a time-frequency approach in order to examine activity in the theta and alpha frequency bands as indices of cognitive control and attentional engagement. The results showed that error processing was characterized by increases in theta-band activity, accompanied by decreases in alpha-band activity, in both healthy control participants and participants with schizophrenia. However, both the theta and alpha effects were significantly reduced in participants with schizophrenia. Post-error increases in theta activity were associated with improved accuracy on subsequent trials in control participants but not in participants with schizophrenia. In addition, increases in alpha-band activity were found in the prestimulus period before partial attention lapses, but only for control participants and participants with schizophrenia with relatively low positive symptom severity. These results provide evidence for a deficit in cognitive control mechanisms mediated by midfrontal theta activity in schizophrenia, and suggest a particularly pronounced deficit in patients' ability to engage adaptive control mechanisms following errors. Our results also indicate that partial attention lapses can be indexed in both control participants and participants with schizophrenia by increases in alpha activity, but that in schizophrenia this varies as a function of positive symptom severity. We suggest that disrupted theta-band function represents a key deficit of schizophrenia, whereas disruptions in the alpha band may be the byproduct of atypically regulated attention