The fifth anniversary of Egypt‘s 2011 uprising has produced an oddly structuralist set of reflections in which the failure of its democratic transition has taken on an almost foreordained quality, notes… Read more »
Russian President Vladimir Putin and the extremist Islamic State group are both engaged in efforts at state building that share two qualities: each seeks to create a political alternative to… Read more »
Vietnam’s Communist regime ended an unprecedented internal power struggle Thursday by deciding to stick to the status quo over a more reform-minded challenger, USA Today reports: Nguyen Phu Trong, who… Read more »
President Xi Jinping appears to be treading a similar path to the Chinese emperors during the legendary surpluses of the Han dynasty, an age characterized by the first Chinese… Read more »
Hong Kong lagged behind its neighbors such as Taiwan, South Korea and the Philippines in terms of rights and freedoms enjoyed by individuals, an annual study by a US-based research… Read more »
Authoritarian regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Russia have had to slash government spending because of the drop in oil prices, notes Erik Voeten, Associate Professor of Geopolitics and Justice in… Read more »
Iran has excluded Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the founder of the Islamic republic and a cleric with ties to reformist politicians, from contesting elections to the country’s powerful Assembly of… Read more »
After a tense year marked by widely-criticized elections in which Ethiopia’s ruling party won 100 percent of parliamentary seats, 2015 concluded with yet more repression in the East African nation,… Read more »
Despite renewed economic growth and progress on a number of social indicators in 2015, the government of Vietnam continued to crack down on independent writers, bloggers, and rights activists deemed… Read more »
The politics of fear led to a global roll-back of human rights and a great civil society choke-out during 2015, according to the 659-page World Report 2016 from Human… Read more »