An Independent Jewish Voices panel discussion suggests that the most important lesson of the Arab Spring may be the introduction of public will and opinion into the debate, and that this applies as much to inter-state diplomacy as domestic governance.
What the Iranian elite needs to learn from Turkey is how to rescue Islam from the state
The constitutional debates that took place in the run-up to the formation of the current Iraqi constitution provide a blueprint for the questions Islamic parties must address if they are to be insiders to the process of consolidating democracy.
Democratic transformation in the Middle East will need a recognition and resolution of legitimate Kurdish claims. The Arab Spring provides a new setting for the challenge
We need to understand that patience on the Palestinian side has almost completely run out after many fruitless years of aimless negotiations and feeble international mediation. The Palestinians – exasperated by US reluctance or impotence - see the shelf-life of the long-running but deeply flawed p
Democracies are about more than elections and majorities: they require genuine separation of powers, autonomous institutions and associations, all regulated by the rule of law. The current Turkish situation is the product of social and institutional patterns, now in question, in which multiple cen
Meles Zenawi has been protecting himself from any Arab-spring copy-cat movements in Ethiopia. On balance, it is unlikely that the opposition is strong enough to mount the kind of challenge seen in Egypt and Tunisia. Conditions are not seen to be as brutally unjust in Ethiopia, and no one doubts th
The democratic wave in the Arab world confirms the emptiness of al-Qaida’s ideology, strategy and rhetoric. The death of Osama bin Laden can be seen as part of this wider process, says Khaled Hroub.
Just as Iraq’s Prime Minister was putting the finishing touches on an authoritarian edifice in the best Arab tradition, the whole model comes crumbling down.
Despite the best efforts of the US and its European and regional allies to ignore them, international and regional factors that enabled the domestic power structures to remain in place for so long have also been the focus of protesters’ grievances and demands.
New demands for political reform in the Gulf are meeting a repressive response by regimes especially panicked when pro-democracy protests swell into cross-sectarian movements for meaningful political reform. This brutality polarises opinion between advocates of reform and proponents of repression.
The latest of the theatre director’s ‘strange days’ in Cairo, while waiting to hear if he and his partner have permission to enter Gaza; caught in stasis while extraordinary events unfold around them. Updated.
