Domestic Politics Archive

On Jan. 21, 2009, President Barack Obama pledged to close the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The announcement’s timing and setting highlighted its importance. On just his second day in office, and flanked by former generals and admirals, the president had made it a top priority to shut the U.S. prison that had become synonymous with human rights abuses and lawlessness. That same day, Obama issued an order banning torture and closing secret CIA “black sites” in an effort to align America’s fight against al-Qaida and other terrorist groups with due process and the rule of law. Obama […]

Late-October elections in the Czech Republic yielded no parliamentary majority for any party. In an email interview, Robert Kron, a senior analyst at the Center for European Policy Analysis, explained why the vote was inconclusive and the prospects for coalition negotiations. WPR: What political factors explain the inconclusive parliamentary vote and the Social Democrats’ poor performance? Robert Kron: The resounding failure of the traditionally most prominent political parties—the Social Democrats (CSSD) and the Civic Democrats (ODS)—and the striking success of Andrej Babis’ Action of Dissatisfied Citizens (ANO) movement, which will enter parliament for the first time, can be explained by […]

Introduction: A Climate of Fear Every democracy must wrestle with the dilemma of ensuring security for its citizens, while at the same time protecting their liberty and privacy. Since 1975, when the U.S. Senate’s Church Committee, led by Sen. Frank Church, investigated media revelations about domestic spying by the CIA, the United States, more than any other nation in history, has been attempting to find an effective response to this dilemma: a workable equilibrium between the activities of secret agencies, on one hand, and the proper measures of accountability necessary to prevent them from overstepping the boundaries of law and […]

Despite suffering huge losses, the Syrian army has managed to survive longer than almost anyone thought possible at the beginning of Syria’s civil war. According to a recent estimate by the Syrian Observatory of Human Rights (SOHR), a U.K.-based monitoring group, 28,800 Syrian soldiers have been killed since the beginning of the conflict 2 1/2 years ago. This represents a massive hemorrhage of manpower for an army that was estimated to have a strength of 220,000 at the beginning of the war. The army has also suffered desertions and from the beginning could rely only on a handful of crack […]

On Oct. 27, voters in Georgia picked Giorgi Margvelashvili to replace outgoing President Mikheil Saakashvili, affirming the prominence of the Georgian Dream party, which ousted Saakashvili’s United National Movement in parliamentary elections last year. In an email interview, Cory Welt, associate director of the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies at the George Washington University and an adjunct fellow at the Center for American Progress, discussed the ramifications of the vote for Georgia’s democracy WPR: What does the successful presidential vote, in addition to last year’s parliamentary transfer of power, indicate about the strength of Georgian democracy? Cory Welt: […]