Is Turkey heading toward autocracy?
A referendum in Turkey on April 16 will decide whether the country’s parliamentary system is replaced with a stronger presidency. This is something President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is hoping for,… Read more »
Category: Analysis
‘Radical Islamic terrorism’? Problematic assumptions
It is a misconception that the Islamic State is focused on fighting the United States or the broader West, says Richard Stengel, a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “I led… Read more »
China, N Korea and Iran copying Russia’s information warfare
Russia is suspected of being behind a sustained hacking attack against the Italian foreign ministry last year that compromised email communications and lasted for many months before it was detected,… Read more »
Governance critical to Syria’s post-conflict stabilization
The prospects for the removal of Syria’s Assad regime and a near-term transition to a “moderate opposition” are poorer than ever, according to a new RAND report. But there is… Read more »
Engage Russia, but ‘grand bargain with Putin is a terrible idea’
Advocates of engaging Vladimir Putin’s Russia should avoid fueling unrealistic expectations of a breakthrough and instead seek incremental progress on specific topics based on a set of guiding principles, says… Read more »
How Putin became global ideological hero of nationalists, populists
Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved his current geo-political “prominence because he anticipated the global populist revolt and helped give it ideological shape,” argues analyst Franklin Foer. “With his apocalyptic… Read more »
Ukraine’s leaders ‘giving up on reuniting the country’?
Ukraine’s leaders may be giving up on reuniting the country, The Economist reports: Most Ukrainians say the war in Donbas, as the region is known, is the country’s most important… Read more »
How not to fuel extremism
Analysts at the Central Intelligence Agency have warned that labeling the Muslim Brotherhood as a terrorist organization “may fuel extremism” and damage relations with America’s allies, according to a summary… Read more »
Tzvetan Todorov – highlighted democracy’s ‘inner enemies’
Tzvetan Todorov, a Bulgarian-French literary theorist and historian of ideas whose concerns in dozens of books ranged from fantasy in fiction to the moral consequences of colonialism, fanaticism and the… Read more »
Upheaval could lead to ‘more vibrant’ democracies – eventually
The current confrontation in Romania exemplifies the “new politics” in the era of global populism, where pushback against democratic norms by incumbent politicians is met with popular resistance, according to… Read more »