The U.S. should do more to boost the struggling state of democracy in countries around the world, lawmakers from both parties said at a Capitol Hill hearing Thursday, the Washington… Read more »
It will take more than one election cycle to get democracy to satisfy the expectations of the Lebanese people, according to Louisa Slavkova and Rob Norris, who served as National… Read more »
Tunisians are aware of their country as the only one in the Arab world trying to make the Islamist–non-Islamist divide work in a genuinely democratic way, notes Thomas Carothers,… Read more »
If a government wants to be considered a respectable democracy on the world stage, it must pass a litmus test: holding multi-party elections, note Nic Cheeseman, Professor of Democracy at the… Read more »
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is one of a crop of present-day political leaders who value the respectability an ostensibly democratic election confers but don’t want to risk actually losing the vote, the… Read more »
The Arab Spring surely satisfies the three criteria for a black swan event: surprising, historically consequential, and rationalized by hindsight, notes the World Bank’s Elena Ianchovichina, author of Eruptions of… Read more »
The violent collapse of the Arab Spring has damaged the cause of liberal politics not just in the Middle East, but around the world. Strongman leaders are back in fashion… Read more »
Puritanical Salafist Muslims have attacked Sufi shrines and communities across the Arab world in a campaign to spread their influence. But in Tunisia, where national history and identity are intimately… Read more »
Liberal democracy “is where the world was, not where it is going,” said US senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. By the end of the year, we should be able to… Read more »
It was a quarter of a century ago this week, on February 26, 1993, when a group of jihadist terrorists, some of whom had trained in Afghanistan, tried to bring down the… Read more »