Category: Middle East/North Africa

Political turbulence: 21st century parties and social media

     

  Social media do shape collective action through, for example, “micro-donations” which make it easy to join a cause, says Professor Helen Margetts, co-author of a new book, “Political Turbulence”:… Read more »

Egyptian writer caught in government crackdown

     

The only reason Khadeega Gaafar knows that authorities extended her husband’s stay in prison is because he hasn’t come back home, The Washington Post’s Erin Cunningham writes: Gaafar’s husband, Egyptian… Read more »

Countering the globalization of jihad

     

Terror attacks in recent months — some claimed by Isis or its adherents — suggest that the Sunni Islamist extremist group and its violent, ultra-conservative ideology are successfully extending their… Read more »

Dawning of a new era? Geopolitical and vox populi risks converge

     

Once largely confined to less-transparent emerging market economies, the post-global financial crisis saw the return of political risks to the advanced democracies as well, while challengers to Western liberalism continue… Read more »

Quiet consensus against Palestinian elections

     

It’s rare these days to find anything that Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, the U.S. and Israel agree on. And yet when it comes to elections there is a  choosing their… Read more »

Inward-looking EU ‘in hock to authoritarians’

     

Over the last five years, the European Council on Foreign Relations’ annual Scorecard has tracked the European Union’s diminishing ability to influence its neighbors. In 2015, the story became one… Read more »

Egypt’s transition wasn’t doomed to fail

     

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 »

Putinism, Islamism no alternative to liberal democracy

     

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 »