Over the last two decades, when China was busy with capacity building, Russia seems to have been pre-occupied with incapacity hiding, writes Ivan Krastev. “When Western commentators try to make sense of the different performance of the new authoritarians, …

“Presidential candidates Nicolas Maduro and Henrique Capriles (right) have begun Venezuela‘s election race with scathing personal attacks even as mourners still file past the late Hugo Chávez’s corpse,” Reuters reports:

Maduro, who was sworn in as acting president …

“The United States is open to a ‘more constructive relationship with the Venezuelan government’ following the death of Hugo Chávez and the expulsion of two military attaches,” CNN reports:

However, the action against the United States is “not a …

The first foreign trip of a newly appointed U.S. secretary of state carries a particular message, foreign policy analyst Ulrich Speck writes for Carnegie Europe. John Kerry’s visit to Europe suggests that we may be witnessing the birth …

The Islamic Republic of Iran isn’t the only state seeking to nationalize the Internet.

“Information has always been power, and governments have long sought to control it. So for countries where power is a tightly controlled narrative, parsed by …

The ruling Ennahda party may hold the most seats in the body convened to oversee the writing of a new Tunisian constitution, writes the Stratfor analysis group, but the Islamist group remains severely constrained and lacks the authority to …

Russians don’t have authoritarian DNA in their genes and it is a myth that democracy is somehow unsuitable for Russia, says a prominent analyst.

Russian society itself erects no insurmountable barriers to the formation of a rule-of-law state,” writes …

“If you’re not a socialist/liberal/radical at the age of 20, you haven’t got a heart. If you’re still one at 40, you haven’t got a head,” the cliché goes.

But there’s an exception to every rule.

“Evolving from pacifist to hawk …

What is the likely impact of the current budget negotiations on US government funding for International Affairs? In the latest installment of the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition’s must-read Budget Watch, Tod Preston, the group’s Government Relations Director, outlines four …

Georgia’s new government “could still go the way of …… previous ones,” The Economist cautions, noting that the Caucasian republic “needs more effective checks on state power than it has had in previous years, in the form of political …