Algerian police recently arrested a number of political and human rights activists and journalists who protested in central Algiers against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s bid for re-election for a fifth term,… Read more »
On the five-year anniversary of Egypt’s Rabaa massacre, some human rights groups say the country has not done enough to address the human rights issues demonstrated in the killing, RFE/RL… Read more »
Arab democracy would simply be inconceivable without Islamist participation, writes Brookings analyst Shadi Hamid. That, by itself, should give us pause, particularly at a time when Western democracies appear uninterested or even… Read more »
The Arab world is in the middle of a process of deep social and political change, according to analyst José Antonio Sabadell. The experience of successive attempted revolutions across the… Read more »
Failure to predict the emergence of the leftist-Islamist alliance that won Iraq’s May elections resulted from a focus on elite politics and sectarian dynamics that obscured these underlying cross-ideological… Read more »
Tunisians are aware of their country as the only one in the Arab world trying to make the Islamist–non-Islamist divide work in a genuinely democratic way, notes Thomas Carothers,… Read more »
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi should prioritize reforms to end serious human rights violations during his second term, Human Rights Watch said today: Al-Sisi won the April 2, 2018 election… Read more »
The Arab Spring surely satisfies the three criteria for a black swan event: surprising, historically consequential, and rationalized by hindsight, notes the World Bank’s Elena Ianchovichina, author of Eruptions of… Read more »
Puritanical Salafist Muslims have attacked Sufi shrines and communities across the Arab world in a campaign to spread their influence. But in Tunisia, where national history and identity are intimately… Read more »
Autocratic allies in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia, have reportedly been told that the U.S. will not “lecture” them on democracy and human rights. U.S. attempts to explicitly… Read more »
