Category: Analysis

New isolationism or a strategy for democratic renewal?

     

A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this, The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing… Read more »

Iranian activists use social media to demand justice, accountability

     

The public outcry over the rape and murder of six-year-old Afghan refugee Setayesh Ghoreishi (left) demonstrates how social media has allowed Iran’s civil society to hold accountable hardliners in the… Read more »

Turkey ‘at the heart of the storm’

     

Reporters Without Borders placed Turkey – where more than 30 journalists are currently under arrest – 151st on a list of 180 countries in its new World Press Freedom Index,… Read more »

Prospects for compromise in Iraq

     

The decision by Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr to have his supporters seize and then vacate parliament in Baghdad appeared to be the act of a man who—at least for now—wants to control rather than… Read more »

Indispensable reforms for Ukraine’s ‘revolution without change’

     

Achieving progress on reforming Ukraine’s economy would send the strongest possible message to critics who doubt the country’s ability to operate as a modern state, argues Carnegie analyst Pierre Vimont:… Read more »

Russia’s ‘hollow men’ locked in dynamic of failure

     

Far from formidable, Vladimir Putin and those around him in the Kremlin have made themselves prisoners of the past, argues Andrew Wood, an associate fellow of Chatham House and a… Read more »

An ‘existential threat’ in China’s future?

     

More than halfway through his five-year term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—expected to be the first of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening crackdown… Read more »

Russia’s growing intolerance of dissent

     

Today, at Moscow’s eminent House of Cinematography, pro-Kremlin protesters attacked the award ceremony of an annual student competition organized by the civil society group Memorial, writes Tanya Lokshina of Human… Read more »

Latin America’s democratic moment?

     

When street protests forced Guatemala’s president to step down last fall amid a corruption scandal (left), it seemed a rare break in a long and lucrative tradition of impunity in… Read more »