Mission Failure? America in the Post-Cold War Era
In the wake of the Cold War something unique in modern American history and rare in the historical experience of any great power occurred: The United States faced no serious… Read more »
Why the experts get Russia wrong
Why has divining Russia’s political future been so hard? asks Timothy Frye, the Director of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University. It is a challenge not because of the supposedly… 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 »
US-Cuba rapprochement benefits regime, not people
The rapprochement between the United States and Cuba – one of the world’s most authoritarian tourist destinations – will benefit the Cuban people little and its fruits will not reach… Read more »
‘Get close’ to have an impact, Power tells students
As a young student, Samantha Power had lined up a summer internship with the local CBS sports affiliate in Atlanta during her summer break from Yale, she told graduates at… Read more »
Sharing worst practice: former Soviet states’ legal tools of repression
The ways in which authoritarian regimes learn from each other and collaborate to develop repressive practices is outlined in Sharing worst practice: How countries and institutions in the former Soviet… Read more »
Tunisia’s Ennahda ditches political Islam
In the days after the fall of the regime of Tunisia‘s President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, the long-exiled founder of the Ennahda movement Rached Ghannouchi (left) made a… Read more »
A Strategy for Democratic Renewal
Democracy is being challenged today as never before since the end of Cold War, notes Carl Gershman, President of the National Endowment for Democracy. Freedom House has recorded ten consecutive… Read more »