Domestic Politics Archive

Two weeks ago a 7.7 magnitude earthquake hit Pakistan, killing more than 300 people and leaving thousands homeless. This came on the heels of floods in August that affected almost 1.5 million people. India, for its part, has not suffered any major natural disasters recently but is facing a larger challenge of continued economic slowdown. Its growth rate has dropped for two quarters in a row in 2013, reaching 4.4 percent, and it has faced a major currency crisis as well. Afghanistan, meanwhile, faces the prospects of even more fundamental challenges to regime stability and state cohesion after the U.S. […]

The past decade has seen an explosion of creative institutional design in new democracies. From Indonesia to Iraq, scholars and policymakers interested in the management of ethnic conflict have engaged in overt “political engineering” with the aim of promoting stable democracies in deeply divided societies. Among advocates, several contrasting approaches to political engineering for the management of social cleavages have been evident. One is the scholarly orthodoxy of consociationalism, which relies on elite cooperation between leaders of different communities, as in Switzerland. Under this model, specific democratic institutions—grand coalition cabinets, proportional representation elections, minority veto powers and communal autonomy—collectively maximize […]

On Aug. 15, Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa announced that he was abandoning the initiative by which Ecuador would commit to leave 846 million barrels of oil in the ground under Yasuni National Park, in the Amazon, if the international community donated $3.6 billion to the country to compensate for the foregone revenue. The announcement sparked protests and a movement backing a national referendum on the issue, but Correa was quick to consolidate political support for his decision. Last week, Ecuador’s Congress approved Correa’s plan to drill in the park, even as the Constitutional Court approved a request by environmentalists for […]

Over the weekend, Tunisia’s Islamist governing party, Ennahda, formally agreed to relinquish power in favor of a caretaker government that will supervise new elections. According to Sherelle Jacobs, Tunisia has managed to avoid the chaos of Egypt’s anti-Islamist collapse in large part because Ennahda has been willing to compromise: Ennahda has avoided alienating secularists and liberals on the same scale as the Muslim Brotherhood during precarious political moments. For example, tensions between Tunisian secularists and Islamists soared overnight following the assassination of Tunisia’s secular opposition leader, Chokri Belaid, in February. The then-prime minister, Hamadi Jebali, immediately responded with political concessions. […]

Sunday was the final day in a three-week registration period for Afghan presidential hopefuls to file their candidacies with Afghanistan’s Independent Election Commission. When the commission closed yesterday evening, having stayed open late to accommodate a last-minute flood of registrants, 27 candidates had officially entered the race to succeed President Hamid Karzai in what will be the country’s first democratic transfer of power, with elections scheduled for April 5, 2014. The campaign will take place as most international troops prepare to depart the country by the end of 2014, when the mandate of the International Security Assistance Force officially expires. […]

Last weekend, tens of thousands of protesters rallied in Taiwan against President Ma Ying-jeou, who has become deeply unpopular after a series of scandals. In the latest scandal, Ma, whose approval rating is now below 10 percent, used wiretap data from the Special Investigation Division to demand that Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng step down. Wang, whom Ma has tried to strip of his membership in the ruling Chinese Nationalist party or Kuomintang (KMT), is a political rival of the president’s. But the sources of Ma’s unpopularity run deeper. “Ongoing unrest in Taiwan has both political and economic factors, and will […]

CONAKRY, Guinea — Guineans at home and abroad finally went to the polls on Sept. 28 to elect 114 members of parliament. Despite multiple delays and a series of demands from the opposition for fair political competition, preliminiary results suggest that President Alpha Conde’s ruling Rally of the Guinean People (RPG) party won a relative majority, thus solidifying the gains made during Conde’s first three years in power and further intensifying the rivalry between the country’s different political factions. However, the opposition Union of Democratic Forces of Guinea (UFDG) coalition has disputed the early results and withdrawn from the vote-counting […]

Last week, I expressed my skepticism that the Obama administration would be able to sustain its stated commitment to “rebalance” U.S. policy from the Middle East to the Asia-Pacific region, given the priorities that the president laid out in his speech before the United Nations General Assembly. Barack Obama was supposed to correct that by undertaking a major visit to East Asia this weekend and next week, centered on the forthcoming Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation summit in Indonesia and the ASEAN and East Asia summits in Brunei. The trip was to be an opportunity to demonstrate a renewed U.S. commitment to […]

One year ago, Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos made the riskiest move of his presidency. He agreed to enter peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the Marxist guerrilla organization that has kept the country at war for half a century in a conflict that has taken the lives of more than 200,000 Colombians. If the talks succeed, Santos will earn a place in history, the undying gratitude of the Colombian people and a second term as president. If they fail, the talks could provide the epitaph to his political career. Today, the negotiations with representatives of […]

Recent changes in Japan’s security policies have been interpreted by the media as representing a scrapping of the country’s pacifist restrictions, leading it toward becoming a “normal” nation and acquiring a more assertive military. These changes include permitting the right to exercise collective self-defense, creating a National Security Council, relaxing a ban on exporting defense-related equipment and procuring new military assets. The changes are significant, but they do not represent a fundamental shift. Instead, they represent a pragmatic evolution in response to Japan’s increasingly dangerous neighborhood. Consider first Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s effort to reinterpret Japan’s constitution. At issue is […]

Facing dissent from within his own party over his plans to topple the coalition government of Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta, Silvio Berlusconi reversed course today and decided to back down from an attempt to bring down the government. Berlusconi, the former prime minister, prompted the vote of confidence in Italy’s Senate by threatening to withdraw his party’s support from Letta’s government. The resulting backlash, and Berlusconi’s decision to back down, have left the former prime minister weakened. His People of Freedom Party, which has dominated the political scene in Italy for the past two decades, could also suffer consequences. […]