The 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China has selected the country’s next leaders. The leadership transition, however, will be formalized only with the consent of the National People’s Congress (NPC)—a puppet parliament with highly predictable voting patterns. Officially the highest state body in China, the NPC is mostly a showcase of democratic mimicry. […]
India and the rest of the world need to understand that Myanmar is just at the beginning of the road to democracy, and that its present Constitution does not make the road smooth, says Aung San Suu Kyi In an interview to Nirupama Subramanian, Myanmar’s icon of democracy says that she looks forward to rebuilding democratic ties between […]
President Barack Obama will visit Myanmar (formerly known as Burma) later this month and meet President Thein Sein, who is trying to steer the country toward democracy. Yet sectarian strife could still deal a setback to the government’s significant political, economic, and social reforms that have been made since the democratic transition began in 2011. […]
In Syria‘s horrific civil war, Islamists, ranging from the Muslim Brotherhood to radical Salafi groups, are leading the fight against Bashar al-Assad. Once the war is over, Sunni Islamic political groups are bound to become the most important political force in the country. But Islamic politics is on the rise throughout the region, not just in Syria. In […]
Some months after the invasion of Iraq and the toppling of Saddam Hussein, I sat at lunch with the aging Hosni Mubarak. He was then 76 years old and hard of hearing but soon to “run” for the presidency for a fifth time in 2005. The four times previous, there had been no election at […]
LIKE THE human-rights movement, democracy promotion is a radical project of social and political transformation whose adherents will not or cannot acknowledge either the ideological or the revolutionary character of their enterprise. In this, democracy promotion should be understood as a subset of contemporary liberalism—the only major modern ideology that denies it is an ideology […]
We see a positive trend of significant expansion of democracy, particularly in the second half of the 20th century. Democracy expanded in many regions of the world. It also swept Indonesia in 1997 – and changed us for good. As a result, the political map of the world was significantly changed, with all its strategic, […]
The recent violence over an anti-Islam film is part of a wider clash with the idea of the modern republic. Read Here – The Hindu
SO WHAT HAS GONE WRONG in Europe in recent years? I shall divide my analysis into three broad subjects: the challenge of European unity; the requirements of democracy; and the demands of sound economic policy. These are all related to each other, analytically as well as empirically. Read Here – The New Republic
The twin acts of violence in Libya and Egypt on the anniversary of 9/11 highlight the difficult road ahead for U.S. relations with these nascent democracies, says Robert M. Danin, a CFR Middle East expert. Read Here – cfr.org
looking beyond borders 