U.S. President Barack Obama warned today against a rise in nationalism and populism – from both Left and Right – noting that a backlash against globalization had stoked illiberal movements…. Read more »
History does not follow a teleological path. There is no straight road towards freedom, notes David Motadel, an Assistant Professor of International History at the London School of Economics. Throughout… Read more »
Kanan Makiya* has been described as the Arab world’s “Solzhenitsyn” for courageously bearing witness to unspeakable cruelty, notes the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His new critically acclaimed novel, The Rope, is… Read more »
The question of what constitutes democracy did not have time to be hashed out in the Russian public sphere before that sphere began disappearing a decade and a half ago,… Read more »
In the search for a new social contract that establishes wider consensus-based political legitimacy, North African elites must be willing to simultaneously undertake openings and reforms in the political arena… Read more »
Western ideas—which many in the West believe are universal—collide with the ideals of Middle Eastern societies in ways that aren’t always obvious, argues Steven Cook, a Fellow for Middle… Read more »
In “Arab Fall: How the Muslim Brotherhood Won and Lost Egypt in 891 Days,” Eric Trager upends the standard pat narrative of Egypt’s Jasmine Revolution, notes Oren Kessler, deputy director… Read more »
There are many lessons to take from the Iraq debacle, notes Gerard Russell, who served as an assistant to Iraq’s first elected prime minister, Ibrahim al-Jaafari, in 2005. The postwar… Read more »
The argument for democratic reform in the Middle East seems harder to make today, despite the evidence for it being clearer, than it was when the Arab Spring sprung, argues… Read more »
While Indonesia, India, and Japan share a positive outlook on Myanmar’s democratic transition, they are all hesitant to proactively promote democracy, says a new paper from Carnegie’s Rising Democracies Network…. Read more »