Briefing Archive

Imagine a different Middle East. “Were all outstanding hostilities resolved, border formalities simplified and roads unblocked, one might breakfast beside the Mediterranean in the Lebanese capital of Beirut, drive up to the Syrian capital of Damascus for lunch, race south to Jordan’s Amman for tea, make Jerusalem for an early dinner, and be back beside the Mediterranean for a stroll before bed in Tel Aviv.” That might have seemed like a fanciful vision when John Keay, a British writer and historian, sketched it out in 2003, in his book “Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East.” […]

It’s been two years since South Sudan’s leaders signed an agreement to end a crippling five-year civil war that killed almost 400,000 people and displaced millions, yet peace remains elusive. The country is reeling from escalating communal violence and a deepening humanitarian crisis, made worse by an ongoing political stalemate. In February, President Salva Kiir swore in opposition leader Riek Machar to once again serve as his deputy in a unity government, providing a glimmer of hope that the war-torn nation might turn a corner. It was the latest attempt for the two leaders to share power, after the last […]

MEXICO CITY—Every weekday at 7 a.m., President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador holds a press conference at the National Palace here in Mexico’s capital. Known as the “mananera,” the marathon sessions set the news cycle, but also function similarly to President Donald Trump’s Twitter account, offering opportunities for Lopez Obrador to troll opponents and rally supporters as he pontificates for two hours to a blurry-eyed press corps. Last month, Lopez Obrador, who is popularly known as AMLO, raised eyebrows at one of these events when he suggested that the public should know the full details of then-confidential corruption allegations made by […]

Thai students and other activists have staged a series of escalating pro-democracy protests in recent months, drawing some of the biggest crowds since the country’s last coup in 2014. Their demands initially focused on constitutional reforms and new elections, after last year’s vote was widely seen as skewed toward a party aligned with the military. The demonstrators also called for an impartial investigation into the apparent abductions and murders of anti-government activists living abroad. Several Thai dissidents who had been living in Laos disappeared last year, while the bodies of others were found in the Mekong River, disemboweled and filled […]

French President Emmanuel Macron has clearly decided to up the ante in a standoff with Turkey in the Eastern Mediterranean, where France is backing Greece and Cyprus in their dispute with Ankara over natural gas reserves and maritime boundaries. First, Macron ordered a temporary reinforcement of French aerial and naval assets to the Eastern Mediterranean in mid-August, in response to Turkish ships resuming controversial gas exploration activities south of Cyprus. Then, he went as far as to frame his actions as a “red line policy” in order to show President Recep Tayyip Erdogan that he meant business. Although France’s military […]

In the early hours of Aug. 19, five men in various shades and styles of military fatigues took to Mali’s national TV station to introduce themselves. The mid-ranking officers had begun the previous day with a mutiny in the garrison town of Kati and ended it by arresting the president, Ibrahim Boubacar Keita, in the capital, Bamako. Malians had been glued to their TV sets for hours. First, they watched a detained Keita offer his resignation and dissolve the Malian government on live TV. Then, they met the anonymous men in berets who were now in charge—and still are. Calling […]

When Kyriakos Mitsotakis came to power as prime minister in July last year, he had a familiar pitch to Greeks. In opposition to the populist, left-wing government under the Syriza party, he offered an economically liberal and technocratic program that would attract foreign investment and do away with many of the ailments that have plagued Greece’s state machinery for decades. A year later, though, things are not where Mitsotakis hoped they would be. The COVID-19 pandemic derailed not just his economic plans, but the global economy as a whole. He now faces some all-too familiar economic and political problems in […]

Across West Africa, the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing back painful memories of the Ebola epidemic, which spread from the remote forest region in Guinea to Liberia and Sierra Leone, infecting over 28,000 people and claiming the lives of more than 11,000 from 2014 to 2016. As the region grapples with a new virus, have civil society groups and policymakers applied the lessons they learned from Ebola to the fight against COVID-19? Or are West African countries repeating the same fatal mistakes? With so much public mistrust of the governments in Guinea, Liberia and Sierra Leone, local human rights groups and […]

It was probably just a matter of time before Bolivia’s response to the coronavirus became viscerally polarized. With an unelected interim government appearing to overstep its mandate and repeatedly pushing back new elections, and an opposition embittered by the ousting of the previous president, Evo Morales, over alleged electoral fraud, the Andean nation was already desperately divided before being hit by the pandemic. Now, however, Bolivia is mired in a partisan fight over who is responsible for the deaths of COVID-19 patients due to dire shortages of oxygen in hospitals. The trigger came last month when supporters of Morales blockaded […]

Since early 2019, the Democratic Republic of Congo has been governed by an uneasy coalition built around President Felix Tshisekedi and his predecessor, Joseph Kabila, who ruled the country for 18 years until finally agreeing to step down after the 2018 election. Until recently, tensions between Tshisekedi and Kabila only rarely spilled over into public view. But a recent disagreement, over who to appoint as the chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission, has taken the feud to a new level. In July, the National Assembly—dominated by Kabila’s coalition, the Common Front for Congo, or FCC—nominated Ronsard Malonda, a Kabila […]