Highlights — April 2009

Religion and Democracy
By Jean Bethke Elshtain
The secularization hypothesis has failed, and failed spectacularly. We must find a new paradigm to help us understand the complexities of the relationship between religion and democracy.

Reading Russia: The Siloviki in Charge
By Andrei Illarionov
The holders of political power in Russia today are the siloviki—the people who work for, or who used to work for, “the ministries of force.”

Reading Russia: The Rules of Survival
By Ivan Krastev
The centrality of the sovereign state is the binding bond in the political imagination of both the Kremlin and Russian society at large.

Highlights — January 2009

Democracy Assistance: Political vs. Developmental?
By Thomas Carothers
Democracy-aid providers are moving away from one-size-fits-all strategies and are adapting their programs to diverse political contexts. Two distinct overall approaches to assisting democracy have emerged in response.

Can Cuba Change? Ferment in Civil Society
By Carl Gershman and Orlando Gutierrez
The opposition within Cuba has become more diverse as well as more unified, and the regime, despite its enduring capacity for repression, is showing signs of underlying weakness.

Is Democracy Possible?
By Bruce Gilley
While the belief in democracy has spread around the world, it has begun to crumble in some of the West’s finest academic institutions.

Highlights — October 2008

Thailand Since the Coup
By Thitinan Pongsudhirak
Torn between populism and those who fail to respect democratic limits in combating it, Thailand badly needs to locate a middle ground where the best of its old traditions can help it adjust to the new challenges that it faces.


Georgia's Year of Turmoil
By Miriam Lanskoy and Giorgi Areshidze
A domestic political crisis began brewing in Georgia long before the current conflict with Russia. Since the Rose Revolution, the country has been troubled by flawed elections, a "superpresidency," and a malleable constitution.

Highlights — July 2008

The symposium "Islamist Parties and Democracy" explores the rise of Islamist parties and its implication for the future of democracy in the Middle East. Other essays address the Northern Ireland conflict, democratic consolidation in South Korea, ASEAN's role as a force for democracy, and more.

Free articles (PDF):

Islamist Parties and Democracy: Three Kinds of Movements
By Tamara Cofman Wittes
The usual division of Islamists into “moderate” and “extremist” categories is less helpful than a threefold classification that suggests a distinct policy approach toward each group.

Islamist Parties and Democracy: Going Back to the Origins
By Husain Haqqani & Hillel Fradkin
On Islamism’s own original terms, the very existence of Islamist parties is a paradox. Do such parties thus represent a decisive break with the Islamist past that may portend revisions in other areas of Islamist doctrine as well?

The Real Causes of the Color Revolutions
By Lucan Way
The “color revolutions” in the postcommunist countries cannot be attributed to diffusion alone. Structural factors offer a better explanation of why such revolutions have succeeded in some countries and not in others.