Analyses
Myanmar’s Struggle for Freedom Three Years After the Military Coup
Kristina Kironska 22 February 2024
Three years after the failed military coup in Myanmar, there is genuine hope within the country for democratic resistance. By the end of 2023 and into the beginning of 2024, Myanmar reached a turning point, with significant successes achieved by the revolutionary movement, particularly on the battlefield. For the first time since the coup, there is a growing possibility that the resistance movement may prevail against the military dictatorship.
  • Hijacked Discourses Impede Cultural Plurality in International Affairs
    Seán Golden 24 April 2024
    Jürgen Habermas’ theory of civic discourse imposes binding rules on debate in order to subsequently bind behavior. Perhaps this could be extended to international affairs. Scholar Wang Minmin advocates establishing “a set of negotiable yet binding communicative rules and values, [and] world opinion [that] would both allow civic discourse and act as the binding power of an international norm.” Such an approach would require “that we must first acknowledge the differences in moral orders on both sides, but then also move beyond this to realize the common ground on which both sides stand.”
  • A Campaign Under Modi’s Heel
    Maria Tavernini 19 April 2024
    India, a country that loves to be defined as the world’s largest democracy, or the “mother of democracy” – using the words of its Prime Minister Narendra Modi – has just started its 18th general election. The massive democratic exercise is going to take place from today through June 1, with 970 million people heading to the polls in seven phases, with results expected to be announced on June 4. However, many have pointed out that it is not only simply the fact of holding elections that makes a country a democracy. According to V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report, India dropped down to an “electoral autocracy” in 2018 and stayed in this category up to now.
  • Slovakia and Poland at the Ballot: Pellegrini Prevails, Political Deadlock in Warsaw
    Fabio Turco 17 April 2024
    On the weekend of April 6-7, the citizens of both Poland and Slovakia went back to the polls, only six months after elections that resulted in important shifts in their respective governments. These more recent elections constituted a first test for the new executives. The elections in Poland were for local administration, while those in Slovakia were presidential.
  • Turkey’s Elections a Defeat for Erdogan not a Victory for the Opposition
    Alessandra Tommasi 5 April 2024
    Turkey’s local elections on March 31 produced a historic result: the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won 37.7 percent of the vote, beating President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party (35.5 percent) for the first time in more than two decades in power. If the CHP’s result is not surprising in Turkey’s big cities, the AKP also lost regions such as Anatolia, once considered strongholds of the majority party. It was “a turning point,” as Erdogan stressed after the results of the elections. But the CHP’s “victory” was more of an AKP’s resounding defeat, according to Cengiz Aktar, professor of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies at the University of Athens.
  • The Uncertain Glory Still Under Observation
    Giancarlo Bosetti 4 April 2024
    “While India has rapidly climbed the ladder of economic growth rates, it has fallen relatively behind on the scale of social indicators of living standards, even compared to many countries that India has overtaken in terms of economic growth.” So wrote Nobel laureate Amartya Sen and Belgian economist Jean Drèze in An Uncertain Glory. India and Its Contradictions, a key text that in 2013 analyzed and exposed the failures of one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, then at 6 percent. More than a decade later, India’s “uncertain glory” is perhaps even more uncertain, despite Narendra Modi’s aspirations to make it a great power.
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    Can We Prevent an Iranian Caliphate?
    A Vatican City-Style Arrangement for Al-Aqsa
    Jonathan Laurence 3 April 2024
    The Gaza war is a reminder that the Europeans left behind an unstable status quo a century ago. Absent a Sunni consensus, Iran is making an indirect power play. Iran’s weakness is also a strength: as non-Arab, Shiite Muslims, Iran’s leaders can’t trace their ancestry to the prophet Muhammad’s qureysh tribe—as can Jordan’s and Morocco’s monarchs, and as ISIS’s Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi claimed. Though around 85 percent of Muslims are Sunni, the demography of global Islam has long favored much larger non-Arab populations. The dynamic might be resolved with a Vatican City-style solution for Al Aqsa.
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