Category: Analysis

Nicaragua: ‘no one left to vote for’

     

The democratic transition that we Nicaraguans began in 1990, and the peacebuilding we undertook after a tragic war between brothers, relied on an essential foundation: honest and transparent elections, notes… Read more »

Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change

     

“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »

After decade of Raul Castro, reform still lagging

     

Veteran Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas was briefly hospitalized in Santa Clara on Friday after losing consciousness in his home on the 16th day of a hunger strike to protest government… Read more »

Russia dreams of Turkey pivoting to ‘authoritarian international’

     

Turkey on Tuesday warned of rising anti-American sentiment and risks to a migrant deal with the European Union, ramping up the rhetoric in the face of Western alarm over the… Read more »

Post-Soviet Eurasia: What’s Gone Wrong?

     

After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great… Read more »

A case for electoral reform

     

  There is an electoral system that improves upon the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPP) or plurality method of election, at least in surfacing second and third (and lower-order) preferences, argues Donald… Read more »

‘Appropriate assistance’ to Ukraine could be vulnerable?

     

The Russian-backed president of a separatist region in Ukraine was wounded on Saturday in an assassination attempt, highlighting rising violence in the country’s east, The New York Times reports (HT:… Read more »