It seems somehow fitting that Vaclav Havel should pass away a year on from the self-immolation of Mohammad Bouazazi and just hours before the death of Kim Jong-Il.

While the Tunisian street vendor, whose sacrifice sparked the Arab Awakening, personified …

“This must be how civil society begins; it grows from deep inside you,” Olga Romanova, a former television journalist, tells David Remnick. A writer for Novaya Gazeta and head of Rus Sidyaschaya (“Russia behind bars”), a prisoner support group, …

At least 10– and perhaps as many as 70 – people were killed and up to 500 wounded in Kazakhstan today when police opened fire on striking oil workers. Violence erupted as hundreds of workers protested in Zhanaozen, an industrial …

Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was one of the last vocal advocates of protected democracy, an idea that withered alongside the political power of Latin America’s military – except, perhaps, in Turkey.

It is not clear why Egypt’s …

Democracy is “under pressure” in many parts of the world, a new global survey suggests. The democratic regression of recent years is continuing, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index 2011, and only 11 percent of the world’s …

Egypt may have completed the second round of its first democratic elections, but the sentencing of a dissident blogger is a disturbing sign of authoritarian resilience, say rights groups.

Maikel Nabil Sanad (above), widely known as the first prisoner …

Russian premier Vladimir Putin today disparaged his critics as pawns of the United States in his first public reaction to the growing protest movement, but the resignation of two leading Kremlin officials suggests that the regime has been rattled …

As media commentators’ breathless enthusiasm for the youthful cyberactivists of the Arab Spring gives way to ominous warnings of a political Winter, two things have become clear: the region is not going through seasonal, but seismic change; and the …

Millions of Egyptians voted in droves in the second round of elections today following a campaign in which rival Islamist groups faced off and secular liberals fought to claw back credibility as a political force.

A Cairo court has dropped …

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin lost a key ally today when “an emblematic figure” in his managed democracy, was forced to resign.

The Obama administration today expressed support for Russia’s …