Last week, a dozen years after the start of the Arab Spring, Tunisia held a referendum that sealed the fate of its democratic experiment. The vote confirmed that the euphoria of those heady days—the ardent belief that change was on the horizon—was not enough to overcome the obstacles to democratization.
At the heart of Turkey’s cycles of escalation against real or imagined enemies at home and abroad are two core dynamics eroding the power structures Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used to dominate Turkish politics for 20 years: economic mismanagement and the accelerating fragmentation of Erdogan’s electoral coalition.
When U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres first released “Our Common Agenda,” his 2021 report on the future of multilateralism, many diplomats were skeptical of how it would apply to peace and security. But parts of the report actually look more, rather than less, relevant after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez has spent his entire term renegotiating and re-renegotiating the terms of the country’s debt, a process that has seen two economy ministers leave office. No politician on the left, center or right wants to make the necessary, but unpopular, decisions the economy needs.