Q & A Archive

On Nov. 27, after weeks of unrest in and around Islamabad, Pakistan’s government signed an agreement with Islamist protesters giving in to their demands for the resignation of the country’s embattled law minister, Zahid Hamid. The government’s concession to the protesters, and the need for the military leadership to mediate the affair, has raised serious questions about the state of Pakistan’s democracy and the power of Islamist groups. In an email interview, Shehzad Qazi, a nonresident fellow at the Center for Global Policy, explains what was driving the turmoil and what the outcome says about Pakistan’s struggling political system. WPR: […]

After President Donald Trump reluctantly signed legislation in August imposing new U.S. sanctions on Moscow for its interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Russia’s parliament last month drafted a bill that would try to shield Russian banks from further sanctions by obscuring their investments in the state-controlled arms industry. The United States and the European Union have imposed multiple layers of sanctions on Russia since 2014 for its actions in Ukraine. In an email interview, William Courtney, an adjunct senior fellow at the RAND Corporation and former U.S. ambassador to Georgia and Kazakhstan, discusses the impact of Western sanctions […]

On Nov. 26, vandals attacked a Muslim cultural center and mosque in the Polish capital of Warsaw, smashing a dozen of its windows. Far from being an isolated incident, the attack came amid growing anti-Muslim sentiment in Poland, where the government has refused to admit refugees and asylum-seekers and far-right extremism appears to be on the rise. In an email interview, Kasia Narkowicz, a researcher of Islamophobia at the University of York in the United Kingdom, discusses anti-Muslim sentiment in Poland, what is behind it and what civil society groups are doing to oppose it. WPR: What is driving anti-Muslim […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Associate Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It’s been more than a year since large-scale protests, followed by a harsh government crackdown, began disrupting life in Cameroon’s Anglophone regions, where the population has long complained of marginalization at the hands of the government and Francophone majority. Yet with actors on both sides embracing increasingly extremist rhetoric and tactics, there’s every reason to believe the crisis will continue—and several signs that its attendant violence will worsen. Within a span of 24 hours this week, five soldiers and […]

On Nov. 26, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro handed over leadership of the national oil company, PDVSA, to Manuel Quevedo, a general with no experience in the energy sector. The move comes after a series of arrests of officials within PDVSA on corruption charges, including six earlier in November. In an email interview, David Smilde, a senior fellow at the Washington Office on Latin America and curator of the blog Venezuelan Politics and Human Rights, discusses Maduro’s underlying political motivations for the moves and the military’s increasing control of Venezuela’s economy. WPR: Maduro has arrested around 50 PDVSA officials since August, […]