Beyond Daesh: Crisis of Governance and Imperative of Reform
Some 89% of respondents to the annual Arab Opinion Index (AOI) survey expressed negative and very negative views about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or… Read more »
Category: Analysis
How Egypt’s activists became ‘Generation Jail’
Six years after the Arab Spring, Egypt’s democracy activists live under constant threat of prison — or worse, notes analyst Joshua Hammer. It was just six years ago that Ahmed… Read more »
How to preserve Tunisia’s fragile democracy
Tunisia’s top diplomat wants the U.S. to “reach out more” to the tiny North African nation for collaboration against the evolving threat posed by the Islamic State — and to… Read more »
Will Democracy Survive Big Data and AI?
“Will Democracy Survive Big Data and Artificial Intelligence?” is written, refreshingly, not by the usual suspects from the Anglosphere, but by a group of academics from universities in Germany and… Read more »
Ukraine’s soft-power struggle faces hard reckoning
When “little green men” invaded Crimea in the spring of 2014, Russian media went into overdrive, smearing Ukraine’s Euro-revolution as a “fascist coup d’état,” POLITICO reports: A group of professors and… Read more »
Boris Nemtsov: The Man Who Was Too Free
In the shadow of the red brick Kremlin walls, an informal shrine marks the spot and the memory of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic,… Read more »
EU-US must win hearts and minds in Western Balkans
German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that Turkey’s approach to democracy and the rule of law are “deeply problematic” to the country’s future cooperation with the European Union. “These deep… Read more »
Drugs trial exposes Venezuela’s kleptocratic elite
When a US federal judge sentences two Venezuelan drug smugglers, perhaps later this month, it will mark the final chapter of a story worthy of the Netflix series “Narcos,” say… Read more »
Kremlin hopes for ‘Post-West’ world order recede
Europeans are waking up to the fact that Russia is trying to do by peaceful means what the Soviet Union once threatened by violent ones: overthrow democratic governments, James Kirchik… Read more »
The civic media crisis: what can be done?
The media, civil society, and democracy are under unprecedented duress around the world. It is important to see these phenomena as interconnected—to understand that the decline of the civic media… Read more »