Vladimir Putin has now been in power in Russia as president and prime minister for twenty years. The local elections held in September provide an opportunity to evaluate the results… Read more »
Russia lacks China’s muscle when it comes to trade and infrastructure. But it has other assets. One is a shrewd appreciation of the political needs of African dictators, another is… Read more »
Jamal Khashoggi and I disagreed on almost all political issues, but we agreed on one thing: that the Arab world had profoundly changed in ways that rendered the old… Read more »
Globally, China’s reputation has deteriorated significantly since 2012 stemming from a perception of financial, diplomatic, and military bullying as well as blowback from the increasingly naked geostrategic ambitions of the… Read more »
Ever since the earliest years of this century, Ukraine has been the contested frontier in a grand ideological struggle between democracy and kleptocracy, analyst Franklin Foer writes for The Atlantic. … Read more »
Egyptian security forces rounded up hundreds of people following small but rare anti-government protests, rights lawyers said Monday, as authorities moved to take harsh preventive measures against more unrest. Hundreds of… Read more »
Corruption undermines democratic institutions, slows economic development and contributes to governmental instability, Mirella Dummar-Frahi, Civil Society Team Leader at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) warned the… Read more »
Life for Isabel dos Santos appears to be an endless round of international conferences, meetings with celebrities and the run-of-the-mill experiences of the average billionaire philanthropist, although critics claim that she… Read more »
The tides of illiberalism in central and eastern Europe are in partial retreat in the face of popular mobilization in defense of the rule of law that deserves western support…. Read more »
An estimated fifty thousand people in Moscow (Moscow Times/CFR) protested the barring of independent candidates from the ballot in an upcoming local election in what was one of the country’s… Read more »
