“If you look at the broader region of the Middle East, what you observe is a large number of wars. Right now, a war is going on in Syria, another civil war is going on in Afghanistan, there is conflict in Libya, before that there was Iraq and Iraq is not finished yet, there was Lebanon…It looks like the region of the Middle East suffers from many different civil wars, suffers from a lot violent conflicts. Why does the wider MENA region continue generating wars, while armed conflicts declined worldwide after the Cold War?” asks political scientist Stathis Kalyvas, Arnold Wolfers Professor of Political Science & Director, Program on Order, Conflict and Violence at Yale University. The reasons are “international interests, transnational revolutionary factors and parochial, local divisions, but also stronger counterhegemonic ideologies which keep the conflicts going.” We interviewed Professor Kalyvas during our Istanbul Seminars 2013.