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 »
What is happening in Ukraine shows that if there is sufficient courage and strength in numbers, people power can make a difference, says Carnegie analyst Judy Dempsey. The sheer pressure… Read more »
The February 2015 assassination of Russian opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was only the latest and most dramatic example of the political violence that has been central to the Putin… Read more »
The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »
The African National Congress was meant to be different from other liberation movements on a continent where freedom fighters have mostly failed to make the transition to governing. Today,… Read more »
The emergence of a virulent new strain of authoritarian populism on both sides of the Atlantic has prompted many observers to draw (largely inappropriate and far-fetched) analogies with the… Read more »
The collapse of the post-colonial Arab system is, at its heart, a crisis of legitimacy. The impact of colonialism, often blamed by Arabs for their woes, should not be… Read more »
As negotiations continue to uphold a teetering ceasefire in Syria, the primary U.S. effort in Syria should be a bottom-up strategy to build cohesive, moderate, armed opposition institutions with a… Read more »
Perhaps the most intriguing question regarding political development in the post-Mao era is why China has not taken significant steps toward democratization despite more than two decades of unprecedented… Read more »
A new global competition in “soft power” is underway between democracy and autocracy, but only one side seems to be competing seriously, according to Christopher Walker, Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond,… Read more »