Category: Analysis

Muslim Democrats? How to explain shift in Tunisia’s Ennahda

     

In a move widely reported as a landmark separation of mosque and state, Ennahda announced it was separating politics from preaching, notes Oxford University researcher Monica Marks. It also unveiled… Read more »

Violence against Morocco’s women poses constitutional test

     

After more than three decades of advocacy, the women’s movement in Morocco, supported by a large segment of civil society, has had high expectations that the long awaited Combating Violence… Read more »

Youthful dissent challenges Angola’s elite

     

Angola’s ruling elites are no more or less corrupt than their Western counterparts. Or that at least was the claim of H.E. Antonio Luvualu de Carvalho, the regime’s Roaming Ambassador,… Read more »

Mission Failure? America in the Post-Cold War Era

     

In the wake of the Cold War something unique in modern American history and rare in the historical experience of any great power occurred: The United States faced no serious… Read more »

Why the experts get Russia wrong

     

Why has divining Russia’s political future been so hard? asks Timothy Frye, the Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. It is a challenge not because of the supposedly… Read more »

Venezuela: uprising, referendum or coup?

     

Popular uprising? Recall referendum? Coup d’état? Associated Press asks: Venezuela’s economic meltdown has become so dire that few political analysts believe President Nicolas Maduro will manage to finish his term,… Read more »

Why Tunisia’s Ennahda rejected Islamist ‘ideology of failure’

     

  How to explain the shift in Tunisia’s Ennahda movement, which has formally stepped away from the radical Islamism of its past to divide itself into a civil political party and… Read more »

Obama chides Vietnam on political freedoms

     

  U.S. President Barack Obama chided Vietnam on political freedoms on Tuesday after critics of the communist-run government were prevented from meeting him in Hanoi, a discordant note on a… Read more »

US-Cuba rapprochement benefits regime, not people

     

The rapprochement between the United States and Cuba – one of the world’s most authoritarian tourist destinations – will benefit the Cuban people little and its fruits will not reach… Read more »