Further to this item, Amnesty International recently noted that the Venezuelan government “appears to have established a pattern of clamping down on dissent through the use of legislative and administrative methods to silence and harass critics.” The World …
Venezuela’s President Hugo has come to embody a new form of authoritarian rule which has “proved surprisingly successful across the world.” But what one observer calls his ideological necrophilia has precipitated a crisis of such magnitude that even his Cuban …
Today’s arrest of Mir Hosein Mousavi’s chief bodyguard is the latest indication of a growing clampdown by Iranian authorities in the run-up to the June 12 anniversary of last year’s disputed elections.
His detention came shortly after hardline parliamentarians …
As a rising labor union leader, Lula helped give Brazil’s transition to democracy “a final, decisive push,” writes Denis MacShane, a British Labour MP. He enjoyed significant international support as the Brazilian labor movement, along with independent unions in …
For a grouping often portrayed as an autocrats’ support network, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization has been “surprisingly disengaged” from the crisis in Kyrgyzstan, writes Richard Weitz, a senior fellow at Washington’s Hudson Institute.
The organization has been …
Harvard’s Dani Rodrik claims that Europe’s growing economic crisis, precipitated by Greece’s fiscal meltdown, is a manifestation of what he calls “the political trilemma of the world economy”: the mutual irreconcilability of economic globalization, political democracy, and the nation-state:…
The Middle East Program of the Woodrow Wilson Center this week presents:
Yemeni Women: Challenges and Little Hope, a discussion with Sultana Al-Jeham, Public Policy Scholar, Woodrow Wilson Center and Executive Director and Chairwoman of Women’s Affairs, Civic Democratic Initiatives …
“The term Empty Quarter refers to a desolate stretch of land in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula,” writes Egyptian dissident Saad Eddin Ibrahim. “More recently it is aptly used as a metaphor to refer to the quarter …
Time magazine’s Rober Harn notes the uncanny, possibly fateful anniversary:
On May 17, Thailand erupted in some of the worst violence in its history as the army launched a crackdown on protesters in Bangkok. The year was 1992, and …
Bangkok braced for further violence today, as Red Shirt protesters gathered for the funeral of a dissident general and the government rejected talks, while troops prepared to march on the demonstrators’ main camp. Some activists spoke ominously of Thailand’s own …