In-Depth Archive

Colombia’s long armed conflict against leftist guerrilla groups may be entering its final stages as peace negotiations with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) proceed. The possibility of peace comes after a decade-long military buildup and a series of offensives left both the FARC and the smaller National Liberation Army (ELN) weakened, but not defeated. Colombia, a distant third in population among Latin American countries, now has the region’s second-largest armed forces and its largest army. This buildup turned the tide in the conflict. But it has also altered the Colombian military’s relationship with its civilian leaders. The president […]

The traditional understanding of China’s civil-military relations is that the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) was historically symbiotic, without functional differentiation or institutional boundaries based on technical specialization. This kind of symbiosis, according to political scientists Amos Perlmutter and William LeoGrande, can be attributed to the legacy of the communists’ guerrilla war in China, which was “a form of politico-military combat in which the fusion of political and military elites is virtually inevitable, and in which the governing of liberated territories is a function performed largely by the guerrilla army itself.” Also […]

With the introduction of multiparty politics, and in particular with the adoption of the 1961 constitution, civil-military relations in Turkey came to be characterized by a duality of governance: a powerful military with an autonomous influence over politics alongside a weak civilian government, reduced to a virtual facade by the presence of the military. The military, and the small civilian elite that worked closely with it, basically called the final shots on major issues. Matters of high politics, such as foreign policy, national security and overall strategic vision, were managed by the military-centric “state,” while issues of low politics, such […]

Today both states and their challengers face a conundrum. Images of dissent and grievance circulate at lightning speed through the global media landscape, fueling demands for change and even revolution. Furthermore they encourage populations to expect governments to fall in response to people power in ever-contracting timeframes. States are perplexed at how rapidly calls for change can spread through social networks. Their challengers too are concerned: They face a loss of control and message coherence. Political change has always been about the long game, as Egypt and Syria demonstrate today. Nevertheless, there remains the challenge of organizing collective action in […]

A lot has changed in the world of technology since the indigenous Zapatista movement emerged in the mid-1990s in southern Mexico to become a symbol of the fight for global justice. To modern would-be revolutionaries, the communication technologies that allowed the Zapatistas to gain global visibility — highlighted by the then-futuristic-looking pictures of Subcomandante Marcos, the movement’s leader, posing in the Chiapas jungle wrapped in electronic gear — now look obsolete and cumbersome. Communication technologies have since morphed into devices that, despite being smaller, are incomparably more powerful for broadcasting, not only because exponential growth in Internet penetration over the […]

For at least the past decade, China has witnessed tens of thousands of mass social protests per year. In 2005, the last year in which Chinese authorities released figures, there were 87,000 such protests. Scholars and observers have estimated that roughly the same number has occurred in each subsequent year. These protests have been the subject of a great deal of media coverage in the West, with the typical takeaway being that China is a simmering cauldron of unrest, perpetually on the verge of bubbling over. Yet the reality is far more complex. Since 1990, almost none of these movements […]

In 2012, Foreign Policy and the Fund for Peace ranked Zimbabwe the fifth most likely country to fail — putting it in greater danger than Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti. World leaders frequently describe Zimbabwe under the leadership of President Robert Mugabe as a pariah state. The United States, the European Union and Australia have all imposed sanctions against the Zimbabwean government for not respecting democracy and human rights, and the United Nations has proposed sanctions against Zimbabwe repeatedly. The country has lost many of its onetime allies and has found itself shunned by many in the international community. Despite all […]

In recent weeks, the Republic of Belarus has been attempting to break out of its near isolation from the European Union and end a period of tension that began after Belarus’ December 2010 presidential election. Following the arrests of more than 700 protesters in Minsk’s Independence Square after the election, the EU revived its travel sanctions on leading Belarusian political and judicial figures, headed by President Alexander Lukashenko. In response to the EU’s actions and its demand for the release of all political prisoners, including former presidential candidate Mikalai Statkevich, Belarus moved measurably closer to Russia. Belarus is a full-fledged […]

On March 8 in Caracas, Raúl Castro, looking somber, stood in a place of honor beside Hugo Chávez’s casket during the late Venezuelan president’s state funeral. Castro was no doubt pondering what Chávez’s death means for Cuba’s ambitious economic reform program — or “updating” of the economic model, as Cubans prefer to call it. Not long after Chávez’s first election victory in 1998, he and Fidel Castro signed the first of what would become more than 100 bilateral cooperation agreements. By the time Chávez died, Venezuela was providing Cuba with some 110,000 barrels of oil daily at subsidized prices, worth […]