Hussein Ibish has appeared on many TV talk shows and never found them an especially emotional experience, until last Sunday, when he was struck by the beauty of Tunisia’s new political banality

During a routine program on Al-Hurra reviewing recent …

In Libya’s version of a phenomenon now familiar in the Arab world, political groups are multiplying at a rapid pace, the National Democratic Institute’s Josh Hills reports from Tripoli. In democracy assistance forums, ideological adversaries are showing a willingness …

Russian billionaire Alisher Usmanov dismissed the editor of a leading weekly magazine today for publishing an image of pro-democracy protests that featured an obscene phrase about Prime Minister Vladimir Putin.

Mikhail Prokhorov, Russia’s third-richest man and would-be presidential rival…

Russia’s pro-democracy protests may not generate another ‘Arab Spring’, but they do represent “the first real outpouring of grassroots popular sentiment” in post-Soviet Russian history, says Stephen Sestanovich (left), an analyst at the Council on Foreign Relations. The current turmoil …

Iraq can become a beacon of democracy for a region roiled by the tumult of the Arab Spring, President Barack Obama believes.

But some observers highlight disturbing authoritarian tendencies on the part of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, while others …

President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad was reportedly “given a hostile reception by angry textile workers on Monday, in a rare humiliation for Iran’s populist president“:

Some Iranian websites identified the man who hurled his shoe as an unemployed textile worker called …

“It was gratifying to hear a despotic leader blame the United States for the rise of a democratic protest movement against his regime,” writes the Washington Post’s EJ Dionne.

“Vladimir Putin, the Russian prime minister, wants his people …

There’s a strong case for giving the 2011 Political Prophecy Award to Russian sociologist Mikhail Dmitriev.

He argued back in February that the regime would face a “crisis of legitimacy” before the end of the year, because the growth of …

“If the Arab Spring was seeded by a liberal insurrection, the Arab Fall has brought a rich harvest for Political Islam,” writes Time magazine’s Bobby Ghosh.

There’s no secret to the Islamists’ success, he claims: there may be …

Tunisia today installed a former jailed dissident as its new president in the latest stage of its democratic transition.

But further progress could be threatened by the twin challenges of economic crisis and radical Islamism, activists and analysts suggest.

The …