Domestic Politics Archive

Representatives from the six-country negotiating group known as the P5+1 and Iran met earlier this month for talks on Iran’s nuclear program that observers generally agree were inconclusive. As the parties prepare for the next round in Vienna June 16-20 and the July 20 deadline for a final agreement approaches, domestic forces in both the United States and Iran are trying to affect the goals and substance of a final agreement. In particular, the arrest two weeks ago of six young people in Tehran who had appeared in an online music video in defiance of Iran’s public morality rules has […]

A funny thing happened on the way to the apotheosis of Egypt’s next president: The adoring crowds stayed home. The former military leader, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, was supposed to win a landslide victory with strong support from a public that had given every indication of burning with passion for the strongman. El-Sisi urged them to come out en masse to give him a strong mandate, and in the past they had always responded. There was never any doubt that el-Sisi would win. The only other candidate, Hamdeen Sabahi, served the useful purpose of giving a patina of legitimacy to the process. […]

The mass kidnapping of schoolgirls by the militant Islamist group Boko Haram put an unwelcome spotlight on Nigeria. Though the attention is new, Nigeria’s security and governance deficits are not, with implications for the country’s domestic politics and regional influence. The United States and international partners have a role to play in assisting Nigeria, particularly in terms of improving security, but ultimately it is how Nigeria rises to the challenges it faces that will determine the course of its future. This special report reviews those challenges, and the responses to them, through recently published articles. Domestic Politics Nigeria’s Fault Lines […]

Venezuela has faced months of opposition protests as international mediation efforts have proved inconclusive. In an email interview, Michael McCarthy, a professorial lecturer of Latin American politics at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, explained the diverse constituencies the opposition represents. WPR: Who are the major constituencies that make up the political opposition in Venezuela? Michael McCarthy: The Venezuelan constitution currently bans public financing of parties and political campaigns. This creates a structural issue for the 19 political parties formally composing the opposition’s Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD), an electoral coalition with the objective of winning support away from the […]

Of the 380 million eligible voters in the 28 countries of the European Union, very few will actually bother to cast ballots in the May 22-25 European parliamentary elections, according to recent polls. Popular disinterest in these elections runs deep, and the trend toward massive abstention—already 60 percent in the most recent EU elections in 2009—will likely be the polls’ biggest winner. Facilitated by the present climate of crisis, right-wing parties, which number approximately 60 across Europe, continue to surge for their part, raising concerns about their weight in the next parliament. What exactly are their chances of success? Analysts […]

Last week former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was sentenced to six years in jail for corruption. In an email interview, Udi Sommer, assistant professor of political science at Tel Aviv University, discussed the state of corruption in Israel. WPR: What institutional and legal factors have facilitated the reported worsening of corruption among Israel’s political parties and civil servants? Udi Sommer: Israel is ranked 36th among 177 countries in the world and 23rd among 34 OECD countries on Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (CPI), but the jury is still out on whether Israel has experienced an increase in real corruption […]

A recent wave of violence in China attributed to members of the Uighur ethnic group, including a knife attack at the Kunming railway station in March that left 29 dead and an explosion at the Urumqi railway station in late April that killed 3, has brought international attention to China’s domestic security policies. China’s northwestern province of Xinjiang has been the scene of simmering ethnic and separatist tensions between the province’s mainly Muslim Uighur majority and the Han Chinese. As the China analyst Kendrick Kuo wrote in WPR in March, the source of the conflict is disputed, with Chinese authorities […]

Nowhere else in Asia has the region’s ongoing tectonic realignment been more evident than in the China-Japan-South Korea triangle. The People’s Republic of China is emerging as a new center of geopolitical gravity within the region; South Korea is rising as an influential middle power; and Japan is experiencing relative decline. The three sets of bilateral relationships, the undisputed pillars of prosperity and stability in the region, are branching in different directions. Within this triangle, China’s strategic approach to both Japan and South Korea is driven by intrinsic factors, the most significant of which are historical grievances, economic interdependence and […]

For decades Japan has patiently fostered maturity and order in its relationships with its neighbors, expecting that time and deepening interdependence would yield behavior constrained by a set of mutually agreed rules—in short, that Japan and its neighbors would be waltzing in a formal ballroom setting. The past couple of years have been, instead, a slam dance of intentional collisions and growing frustration. Can the partners resume their orderly maneuvering, or will flying knees and elbows lead to a fight on the dance floor of East Asia? To perhaps push the metaphor too far, it will depend in large part […]

On May 9, 2014, Guillermo Solis became Costa Rica’s 47th president. His ascension to the office marked the end to one of the country’s most unusual election cycles in recent memory. Solis succeeds Laura Chinchilla, who departed office with the lowest presidential approval rating in the hemisphere, at one point as low as 9 percent. During Chinchilla’s four years in office (2010-2014), her administration was dogged by corruption scandals, tensions with Nicaragua and a growing deficit. How Solis will manage Costa Rica’s mounting difficulties remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: Costa Ricans are ready for change. Chinchilla, […]

The dynamics of triangular interaction among South Korea, Japan and China have constituted a central security paradox in Northeast Asia since the late 19th century, with South Korea cursed by its geographical position at the conflux of great power interests in the region. But the division of the Korean Peninsula and the aftereffects of Cold War rivalry, replaced in the post-Cold War world by the U.S.-North Korea nuclear standoff, have served both to obscure Sino-Japanese tensions over the Korean Peninsula, and to spur periodic trilateral and multilateral cooperation aimed at resolving the regional Cold War hangover caused by Korea’s division. […]

A year ago this week, President Barack Obama spoke at the National Defense University, where he laid out a vision for how the United States would—slowly—move away from the paradigm of war in confronting the threat posed by terrorism. Every war America has fought, Obama reminded us, has come to an end. So must the war footing, if not the struggle, against global terrorism. What’s happened since then? The State Department’s annual assessment of terrorist networks says terrorist attacks on Americans have continued to decline, with just 16 U.S. citizen fatalities last year. U.S. drone strikes targeting terrorists have also […]

South Africa’s fifth national and provincial elections were held on May 7, just after the 20th anniversary of the country’s first democratic elections and six months after Nelson Mandela’s death. The outcome bore a strong resemblance to that of the 2009 election: The African National Congress (ANC) secured more than 60 percent of the vote; the main opposition grew nationally and retained its provincial stronghold; and a newcomer on the political scene finished third with almost 7 percent of the vote. It might be tempting to conclude that in South Africa the more things change, the more they stay the […]

As the U.S. considers how to help Nigeria rescue some 276 schoolgirls kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram a month ago, domestic political attention is turning to the question of what the U.S. could have done ahead of time. In particular, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has come under fire for declining to add Boko Haram to the State Department’s list of designated foreign terrorist organizations, or FTO list. The implication is that the U.S. had an opportunity to prevent the kidnapping, and that the FTO list would have helped. Secretary of State John Kerry did eventually add […]

“It’s no accident that the expansion of Russia and China has come at the exact moment when we are dismantling our military and retreating from the world,” said outgoing House Armed Services Committee chair Buck McKeon last week in a speech shortly before launching into the committee’s marathon markup of the fiscal year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). After hours of wrangling, the committee ended up authorizing over $600 billion for the Department of Defense, including almost $80 billion in overseas contingency operations funds, and weighing in on a host of defense policy issues. The outcome reflected a determination […]

The past few years have seen a remarkable recovery of Russia’s international influence and ambitions. Rejecting an implicit offer of partnership with the West, albeit with junior status for Moscow outside its Eurasian region, the Russian government under President Vladimir Putin continues to pursue a separate agenda aimed at making Russia an important and independent pillar of the global order. Moscow may not yet aspire to become a global superpower and peer rival of the United States again, but its goals and some of its capabilities still exceed those of Britain, France, Germany, Japan and other typical regional powers. Not […]

This month, separatist rebels in northeastern India attacked Muslim villagers, killing 22 people in two days. In an email interview, Paul Staniland, assistant professor of political science at the University of Chicago and author of “Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse,” discussed India’s efforts to contain domestic security threats. WPR: Where do India’s major militant groups operate, and what are their objectives? Paul Staniland: There are four broad contexts in which militant groups operate in India. In Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, several armed groups, manned by a mix of Kashmiris and Pakistanis, are fighting for the accession of […]