Category: Analysis

Report highlights Ukraine’s kleptocrats

     

Ukraine’s anti-corruption agency confirmed the details of a report saying that Paul Manafort, the chair of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, was listed in a “black ledger” as receiving $12.7 million… Read more »

China’s Future a Dictator’s Dilemma: Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival

     

China’s Communist authorities fretting about potentially “subversive” civil society groups — such as rights lawyers and labor activists — have a new red flag: the upcoming birthday of former president… Read more »

What failed Soviet coup tells us about 21st-century populism

     

The abortive coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev twenty-five years ago this week and its aftermath have echoes today, argues Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University professor and senior fellow at… Read more »

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible: Lessons from the Fall of the Berlin Wall

     

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible. This was moral revolution, a revolution of conscience rooted in cultural reclamation, and it resonated through the region because it was entirely congruent with… Read more »

Vietnam’s growing protest culture explained

     

The Formosa scandal in Vietnam has recently made international headlines and offered the international community a rare glimpse into the fringe, but steadily growing, culture of protest and activism in… Read more »

Democracy in China: It’s in the eye of the beholder?

     

China watchers in the West have been fruitlessly searching for signs of democracy for more than 25 years, notes Bruce J. Dickson, professor of political science at George Washington University. But… Read more »

What is Putin up to in Ukraine?

     

Escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine are reflected in their media, with claims that both sides are trying to take advantage of alleged Ukrainian armed incursions in Crimea, the BBC… Read more »

Aid scandals highlight Palestinian ‘institutional decay and corruption’

     

Israeli prosecutors on Tuesday charged a  employee of the United Nations in the Gaza Strip with providing material assistance to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory, including helping… Read more »