How Morocco’s ‘democratic experiment’ went wrong
Morocco, held up as a model for reform in the wake of the Arab Spring, is slipping back into autocracy, according to the Christian Science Monitor: Though a new constitution… Read more »
Search Results for: AUTOCRACIES
Islamist ideology, not Islam as theology, key to combatting extremism
Kosovo police said on Thursday that they prevented simultaneous attacks by the Islamic State group, including on the Israeli national football team that played a World Cup qualifier in neighboring… Read more »
Facing up to authoritarian influence-peddling
For 25 years, open societies saw themselves as the uncontested winners and expected that the remaining autocracies, with the help of western pro-democracy actors, would be relegated to the dustbin… Read more »
West’s ‘China fantasy’ a conceptual failure and strategic blunder
A top-level meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist Party has endorsed President Xi Jinping as a “core” leader, giving him equal billing with late supreme leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao… Read more »
Iran pursuing China Model?
At 77, and with at least one hospitalization in recent years for prostate cancer, Ayatollah Khamenei appears determined, while he still has full power, to make the changes essential for… Read more »
The new dictators: why personalism rules
The propensity of personalist dictatorships to dismantle institutions and sideline competent individuals out of fear of threats to their power bodes poorly for democracy, according to analysts Andrea Kendall-Taylor, Erica… Read more »
Succession planning flurry follows Eurasian autocrat’s death
The recent death of Uzbekistan’s seemingly perpetual president has drawn fresh attention to the uncertainties of one-man rule elsewhere in Central Asia and the Caspian Sea region, writes Freedom House… Read more »
For Putin, Ukraine and Syria are part of the same theater
For a country where politics has long been monopolized by the state, Russia has seen a lot of news in the past few weeks, notes analyst Masha Gessen. It has… Read more »
Islam and democracy: What’s the problem?
Can Muslim-majority countries strike a balance between faith and democracy? Al Jazeera asks. Or, is there an irreconcilable tension between liberal values and Islamic beliefs? When we discuss political Islam… Read more »
Democracy promotion: aim lower?
U.S. interests and values, particularly when it comes to transforming the governance and political institutions of other countries, are almost always at odds with one another, according to veteran… Read more »