United States officials should urge Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, during his visit to Washington to free unjustly imprisoned government critics and political activists, Human Rights Watch said today: They should… Read more »
Arab states in transition are confronted with a seemingly intractable task: rebuilding state institutions and social contracts in an era of global change, notes analyst Yezid Sayigh. Conventional approaches… Read more »
On Easter Sunday, Jamaat-ul-Ahrar (JuA), a splinter group of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP), killed over 72 people and wounded hundreds in an attack on a Lahore park, demonstrating that the… Read more »
An upsurge in industrial militancy is rattling China’s ruling Communist Party, CNN reports. A 2010 strike at the Nanhai Honda car plant in southern China was a turning point for… Read more »
Three major parliamentary parties have agreed to form a new coalition on March 29 and nominate parliamentary speaker Volodymyr Hroysman to be Ukraine’s new prime minister, according to Radio… Read more »
Russia is at a constitutional turning point. The outcome of this moment—an anti-constitutional coup or the beginning of a long effort aimed at the restoration of constitutional freedoms and… Read more »
Unless the Chinese Communist party’s general secretary, Xi Jinping, introduces major political reforms, the economy will tank and the party will crumble, David Shambaugh argues in “China’s Future.” The… Read more »
Simply dismissing the uprisings [of the Arab Spring] as a failure does not capture how fully they have transformed every dimension of the region’s politics, argues Marc Lynch, a… Read more »
A new global competition in “soft power” is underway between democracy and autocracy, but only one side seems to be competing seriously, according to Christopher Walker, Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond,… Read more »
Iraq is decidedly not lost to Iran—and today U.S. leverage is at a new post-withdrawal high, says Zalmay Khalilzad, a former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan, Iraq and the United Nations…. Read more »