The paper shows the important role that NGOs, community groups, and key individuals, including former combatants, can play. It recommends that in appropriate circumstances, 'calculated risks' be taken to ensure that 'hard-to-reach groups' are approached by those with the required local knowledge, expertise, and credibility. Often this means working with former combatants.

Watch Ali Soufan on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, exploring the challenges poses by multiculturalism and ethnic nationalism in the Middle East and Central Asia.

WASHINGTON - The FBI has begun cutting back GPS surveillance in an array of criminal and intelligence investigations following a Supreme Court ruling last month restricting its use, a federal law enforcement official said.

Violence and tragedy have been part of the sport of soccer for decades, as seemingly inescapable as it is unfortunate. Whether it involves stampeding crowds that literally crush fellow fans underfoot in South America or the brazen hooliganism commonly seen in Western Europe, violence has arguably become an intractable element of the sport over the last fifty years. Other sporting events around the world have experienced a similar escalation in violence, both in frequency and in ferocity. In sum, fan violence has literally become an epidemic problem for all sports on a global level.

(CNN) - As the international community debates how to stop the bloodshed in Syria, intelligence experts are looking closely at possible terrorist scenarios that could occur should the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad go.

If Mitt Romney's great-grandfather were Hugh Hefner, rather than Miles Park Romney, he'd have an easier time winning the Republican nomination and the White House. That?s something for voters to ponder, especially given the marital history of Romney's chief rival, Newt Gingrich.

WASHINGTON - Even as the Obama administration says it's close to defeating al-Qaida, the size of the government's secret list of suspected terrorists who are banned from flying to or within the United States has more than doubled in the past year, The Associated Press has learned.

There are two strategic - and interconnected - drivers that define the trajectory of Chinese policy: energy security and unemployment. China's economy now consumes more oil than either Europe or the U.S., and 50% of that oil is imported from the Middle East and North Africa (by comparison, the U.S. imports 25% of its current requirements). If crude oil stays at or near its current price levels, then China will be spending more on oil than it earns in export revenues to the U.S., a turn of events that could force higher levels of unemployment and social discontent.

In the moral atlas of Cullen Murphy, the road to Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the secret "black sites" of the war on terror begins in Montsegur, a fortress in the foothills of the Pyrenees. There, in 1244, a French army assembled at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church besieged several hundred Cathars. Their sect's heresy was dualism, a belief in both a beneficent God and an equivalent evil deity. Enticed into surrendering by the promise that their followers would be spared, the Cathars were burned alive on a pyre.

WASHINGTON, DC - January 25, 2012 - Mr. William Dokurno, NESA Center State Department Fellow, served as moderator of the first panel this afternoon of the Conference on the Proposed International Center of Excellence on Countering Violent Extremism (CVE CoE) entitled "Lessons Learned and Good Practices in Curriculum Development and Training Methodologies." He introduced the role training methodologies in combating extremism.