Tens of thousands of Iranians transformed today’s official Quds Day demonstrations into mass protests against the regime, defying warnings from Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and threats of violent retaliation from the Revolutionary Guards.
President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad used the annual …
The widespread fraud in the recent Afghan election has prompted a rift between accommodationists and hardliners within the international community, while the deteriorating security situation have fed disillusion and prompted some politicians and commentators alike to advocate withdrawal.
But less …
Recent elections in Iran, Kuwait and Lebanon confirm that the threat of radical Islam is receding and the West should overcome its “pathological” fear of engaging political Islamists who have foresworn violence, Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim told a Washington …
Following a two-week “dicta-tour” that took in Libya, Algeria, Syria, Iran, Turkmenistan, Belarus and Russia, Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez apparently failed to secure buy-in to his dream of a natural gas producers’ OPEC, but his extensive arms purchases did prompt …
Russia has moved “from authoritarianism to democracy and back again” and is now in worse shape, according to a Moscow-based analyst. President Dmitri Medvedev’s recent article in Gazeta reiterated the same concerns raised in 1988 at the CPSU’s …
No, sorry to disappoint, dictator Moammar Gaddafi is not planning to democratize “one of the most dictatorial as well as opaque of Arab regimes.” But his son, Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, thinks civil society and representative institutions should play a greater …
As the latest round of Stalinist-style show trials restart in Tehran, a leading ayatollah today called for clerics to speak out against the “military regime.”
The current regime is not a legitimate heir of the 1979 revolution, said Ayatollah Hossein Ali …
Former U.S. Representative Martin Frost (D-TX), Ambassador Princeton Lyman, Progressive Policy Institute President Will Marshall, and Ambassador Stephen Sestanovich have joined the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.
“The Endowment is privileged to welcome these four …
The European Union has a “more cost-effective and sustainable” approach to democratization than the United States, argues Princeton University’s Andrew Moravcsik. He is interviewed on the impressive new Global Europe, an initiative of Ulrich Speck, formerly with RFE/RL. …
Have President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and the Revolutionary Guard effectively assumed power at the expense of the Supreme Leader? Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is either a toy in the hands of Ahmadinejad, and the Revolutionary Guard, or he shares their crimes,” Mahoud …