Houston, We Have a Problem – China
The NBA’s apology for the Houston Rockets general manager’s support of Hong Kong’s protesters is part of a broader trend of U.S. corporate submission to China, James Palmer writes for… Read more »
Category: Human rights
Syria’s civil society faces ‘a disaster in the making’?
The United States has begun withdrawing troops from northern Syria in advance of an expected Turkish military offensive against Kurdish forces in the area, the Washington Post reports. The move… Read more »
Tempered idealism: A saga of democratic disillusion?
Will the post–Cold War era in which U.S. foreign policy addressed such high-minded causes as nonproliferation, democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention turn out to have been a mere parenthesis between… Read more »
Iraqi protests signal emergence of ‘new civil society’
Dozens of demonstrators were killed across Iraq on Thursday and Friday as violent protests against government corruption swelled into a mass spontaneous uprising sweeping much of the country, the worst… Read more »
‘Democratic agnosticism’: Who is equivocating over promoting liberal values?
With protests raging in Hong Kong as well as in autocratic countries like Algeria and Egypt, and anti-democratic strongmen multiplying across the globe, the European Union is facing greater pressure… Read more »
‘Coups and Revolutions’: non-state actors, dysfunctional states impede Arab democracy
The slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi “has become the symbol of our collective moral conscience, the voice for the voiceless in the Middle East,” his fiancée Hatice Cengiz wrote in… Read more »
Renewing the promise of reconciling political Islam and democracy?
Jamal Khashoggi and I disagreed on almost all political issues, but we agreed on one thing: that the Arab world had profoundly changed in ways that rendered the old… Read more »
Jamal Khashoggi – one year on
As we approach the one-year anniversary of Jamal Khashoggi’s brutal murder on October 2, 2019, the Project on Middle East Democracy and 12 other human rights and press freedom organizations… Read more »
A ‘confrontation of monumental proportions is coming’ in Hong Kong
The Sharp Sword stealth drones and the intercontinental ballistic missiles and the truck-borne monuments to the Communist struggle are ready. Flowers have been planted and red lanterns hung along all… Read more »
Anti-corruption protests ‘a turning point’ in Egypt
Egyptian security forces rounded up hundreds of people following small but rare anti-government protests, rights lawyers said Monday, as authorities moved to take harsh preventive measures against more unrest. Hundreds of… Read more »