Category: Civil Society

Can US prod countries like Vietnam toward change?

     

When U.S. President Barack Obama met with Vietnamese civil society members during his recently concluded official visit to the Communist Party-led country, half of the chairs at the appointed venue… Read more »

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 »

Cambodia’s democracy ‘in retreat’?

     

  The Cambodian government should ask the United Nations to help it carry out a full and independent investigation into the October 26, 2015 attack on two opposition members of… 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 »

Azerbaijan court frees campaigning journalist Khadija Ismayilova

     

  A top Azerbaijan investigative journalist, in jail since December 2014, has been freed on the order of the country’s supreme court, the BBC reports: Khadija Ismayilova‘s seven-and-a-half year sentence… Read more »

Kremlin to fund patriotic ‘anti-extremist’ films

     

  Russia’s Ministry of Culture is looking to produce films to spread Russian values, celebrate the country’s history and tackle “crime, terrorism and extremism,” Newsweek’s Damien Sharkov writes: The Ministry… 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 »

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 »