Category: Islamists

Iraq’s ‘wobbly democracy faces most dangerous moment yet’

     

The streets of Baghdad were silent Tuesday after a week of peaceful protests — against corruption, unemployment and lack of basic services — turned deadly. More than 100 people were… Read more »

Great power competition in MENA follows ‘ineffectual’ democracy promotion?

     

Over the last few years, a crisis of legitimacy has beset the liberal international order. In the context of global reassessment, the configuration of regional orders has come into question,… Read more »

‘Coups and Revolutions’: non-state actors, dysfunctional states impede Arab democracy

     

The slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi “has become the symbol of our collective moral conscience, the voice for the voiceless in the Middle East,” his fiancée Hatice Cengiz wrote in… Read more »

Renewing the promise of reconciling political Islam and democracy?

     

  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 »

Tunisia: populism and cronyism risk ‘slide toward authoritarian tendencies’

     

Tunisia’s hopeful transition to a democratic future faces a new challenge. Voters in the country have delivered a sharp rebuke to their political elite. In the first round of presidential… Read more »

Captive Society: What do Iran’s leaders really fear?

     

What do Iran’s leaders really fear? New York Times columnist Bret Stephens asks. Above all, a revival of the Green Movement that nearly toppled the regime following the stolen presidential… Read more »

Tunisia’s ‘Berlusconi’ seeks presidency in Arab world’s only ‘resilient’ democracy

     

Tunisia’s transition to democracy has proved more resilient than some expected. The largely peaceful run-up to the polls has raised hopes the country will achieve its first handover of the… Read more »

Tunisia’s Islamists, secularists vie for power in world’s youngest democracy

     

On September 15, Tunisians will cast ballots in their country’s second free and democratic presidential election since the 2011 revolution, the Project on Middle East Democracy reports. The highly competitive… Read more »

Algeria’s divided democracy movement seeks end to impasse

     

In April 2019, Algerians ousted President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, becoming the fifth Arab country to topple a president since 2011, the Brookings Institution reports. Though successfully deposing the head of state,… Read more »