After Saudi Arabia’s execution of leading Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr sparked a violent protest at the Saudi Embassy in Iran’s capital, Tehran, Saudi Arabia quickly severed ties with its longtime regional… Read more »
Dwindling resources for democracy efforts from the United States government could not have come at a worse time, notes J. Peter Pham, director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center, especially… Read more »
There has been a tendency to see the conflicts happening in different parts of the world as unconnected, as driven by a collection of separate, essentially localized disputes. So we… Read more »
On September 18, Bahrain media reported that Crown Prince Salman, perceived as a conciliator, had sent a letter to his father, King Hamad, outlining areas of “common ground” in talks… Read more »
The recent announcement that Venezuela’s inflation rate is now the highest in all of Latin America is just the latest in a series of setbacks for a nation that earlier… Read more »
Western liberal democracy now faces a competitor Frances Fukuyama did not anticipate when he wrote “The End of History?,” says Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff: states that are capitalist in economics, authoritarian… Read more »
An official State Department photo of the September 11 meeting in Jeddah between Secretary of State John Kerry and King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, posted on Flickr, could be… Read more »
The U.S. strategy to “degrade and ultimately destroy ISIL through a comprehensive and sustained counter-terrorism strategy” and the formation of a “broad coalition” to do so, does not guarantee the… Read more »
There may be a continuum between the purportedly non-violent Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic State, or ISIS. Nevertheless, “it bears repeating that ISIL’s campaign is not fundamentally… Read more »
In the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy, (PDF), Marc Plattner makes the provocative claim that “the era of democratic transitions is over, and should now become the province of the… Read more »