“As fighters with Lebanon’s Hezbollah movement wage the battles that are helping Syria’s regime survive, their chief sponsor, Iran, is emerging as the biggest victor in the wider regional struggle for influence that the Syrian conflict has become,” The Washington …

As the specter of sectarian violence re-emerges in Iraq – the country is on the precipice of civil war, says one observer – an eminent analyst considers whether democracy can be nurtured in societies without democratic traditions and institutions, …

“Democracy promotion is beset by self-doubt” and facing a threat to its credibility in the face of a “democratic disconnect” between citizens and institutions in established democracies, according to a new report.

An insightful and valuable analysis from the German …

A decade after Saddam Hussein’s fall, sectarian violence prompted by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki’s divisiveness and authoritarian instincts threatens to overwhelm Iraq’s nascent democracy, warns Nussaibah Younis, a research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“Last week, Iraq experienced …

The United States should give a higher priority to advancing global religious freedom as a matter of national security, says a major new survey. The persecution of people of faith is inherently dangerous because it has the effect of …

“At least 23 people were killed in Iraq on Monday in a series of car bombs in Shi’ite Muslim areas and militant attacks, taking the week’s death toll to nearly 200 as sectarian violence intensifies,” Reuters reports:

Clashes have …

Britain, France and Israel all believe the regime of Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad has crossed President Barack Obama’s “red line” and used chemical weapons against rebels in the country’s civil war. But the administration has yet to be unconvinced …

Analysts are questioning the Middle East’s “democracy experiment,” and analyzing impediments to democratic transition, in this week’s Fikra Forum.

Tunisian contributor Khaled Chouket writes of the failures of Iraqi governance over the past ten years and analyzes how this …

Iraq’s erratic democratization has achieved significant gains in “transferring some power to a previously disenfranchised population,” says Abbas Kadhim, a senior fellow at the Boston University Institute for Iraq Studies:

Since Iraqis reclaimed sovereignty in 2004 they have managed to …

Geography teaches much about Tunisia, says Robert D. Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor.

It is the Arab country closest to the heart of Europe, jutting out toward Sicily at the central Mediterranean’s narrowest point.

Whereas in states that …