Category: Ideology

Asia’s democratic regression fuels rise of Islamist militants

     

  Today, few people are touting democracy in Southeast Asia as an example of political freedoms, notes Council on Foreign Relations analyst Joshua Kurlantzick. In Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia, and… Read more »

Turkey’s Erdogan getting off democracy train?

     

Under the leadership of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (A.K.P.) presented itself as a Western, reformist, neo-liberal and secular party, and, as late as 2012, 16 EU… Read more »

Saudis facing similar problems to collapsing Soviet Union

     

Saudi Arabia has ordered the segregation of men and women in local council meetings, in a setback to women’s rights in the ultraconservative kingdom, The Wall Street Journal reports. The… Read more »

Countering the globalization of jihad

     

Terror attacks in recent months — some claimed by Isis or its adherents — suggest that the Sunni Islamist extremist group and its violent, ultra-conservative ideology are successfully extending their… Read more »

Threat to liberal democracy’s primacy overstated?

     

The fact that the world’s richest country after World War II had a liberal economy and system of government had important implications not only for the creation of an open… Read more »

Cuban failure: France honors Castro as dissidents beaten

     

Human rights activists and democracy advocates have criticized French president Francois Hollande for receiving Cuban leader Raul Castro – with full honors – as nearly 200 peaceful dissidents were being… Read more »

Egypt’s transition wasn’t doomed to fail

     

The fifth anniversary of Egypt‘s 2011 uprising has produced an oddly structuralist set of reflections in which the failure of its democratic transition has taken on an almost foreordained quality, notes… Read more »

China’s Grand Strategy raises ‘world’s most significant foreign policy question’

     

  President Xi Jinping appears to be treading a similar path to the Chinese emperors during the legendary surpluses of the Han dynasty, an age characterized by the first Chinese… Read more »