In-Depth Archive

The one-year anniversary of an alarming episode of anti-Muslim violence in Nepal focused attention on the community’s continued struggle to assert itself. Despite recent progress in promoting religious pluralism, many Muslims remain marginalized, neglected in politics and invisible in conceptions of national identity. The villages of Narainapur Rural Municipality, in Nepal’s lowland Terai plains, are poor, even by the standards of one of the poorest countries in South Asia. The area does not yet have electricity, and electrical poles installed by the government stand unused. On a typical day, the main road is quiet, with just a handful of vehicles […]

BELGRADE, Serbia—Milica Djurdjevic and Anita Mitic used to celebrate birthdays together, but that was a long time ago. Though they still live in the same city, today they meet only at protests, where they find themselves on opposing sides. The former friends, whose childhoods were marked by years of conflict, have starkly different views of that violent past—and starkly different hopes for their country’s future. Djurdjevic and Mitic were both born in 1990, the year that the first multiparty elections were held in Yugoslavia, a communist federation that had been ruled by Marshal Josip Broz Tito in the decades after […]

UVIRA, Democratic Republic of Congo—When the rebels attacked, some of them arrived on motorized wooden boats, toting rocket-propelled grenades. Others streamed down the lush hills that surround this city, perched on the northern shore of Lake Tanganyika, East Africa’s second-largest lake. Civilians fled in their wake. Members of the group, called the National People’s Coalition for the Sovereignty of Congo, had one simple aim, according to Alemasi Musoshi, a 26-year-old rebel who took part in the attack on Uvira last September. “All we ask is for Kabila to leave power,” he says. Congo’s embattled president, Joseph Kabila, has managed, despite […]

Editor’s Note: This article was updated in December 2018. Foreign tech companies have been forced into difficult compromises and today find themselves asking whether the financial rewards and access to a massive market justify the work required to stay in Beijing’s good graces—especially given that the risk of failure is rising, illustrated by the recent blocking of WhatsApp in China. When users of WhatsApp in China started noticing technical problems with the mobile messaging application in September 2017, nothing seemed unusual at first. The slow sending speeds and inability to deliver video and audio files could have easily been due […]

As the first anniversary of his inauguration approaches, U.S. President Donald Trump has shown no sign of altering his provocative and destabilizing approach to diplomacy. His unpredictability and inflammatory rhetoric have spread confusion about the White House’s intentions in many cases, while diverting attention from the substance of Trump’s policies in others. In this special report, WPR has collected 10 articles assessing how Trump has broken with the traditions of the U.S. foreign policy establishment and where his “America First” agenda has had the biggest impact. Purchase this special report as a Kindle e-book. More Bark Than Bite Trump May […]

Since taking over Portugal’s government in 2015, the country’s Socialist Party has paired economic tailwinds with an effective political narrative about rolling back austerity. It’s unclear, though, whether the party’s success offers lessons for socialists elsewhere in Europe who are losing ground in the current political environment. LISBON—European politics are in turmoil. The United Kingdom is tearing itself apart after a vote to exit the European Union. Spain is deeply divided in the face of separatist demands from its Catalonia region. In France, the far-right National Front mounted a serious challenge for the presidency. Farther east, from Norway to Austria […]