Domestic Politics Archive

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Justin Sherman is filling in for Candace Rondeaux this week. The long-awaited fifth and final report by the Senate Intelligence Committee on its investigation of Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election, which was released earlier this week, is full of disturbing details. The heavily redacted, 966-page report includes revelations about even closer links between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russian intelligence operatives than Robert Mueller found in his special counsel investigation. It also concludes that Russia’s interference operations are still active today, less than three months before Election Day. But it didn’t take long before […]

Belarus’ long-ruling dictator, Alexander Lukashenko, is resisting calls to step down amid a historic wave of antigovernment demonstrations and strikes. Throughout the momentous period of unrest, one of the big questions is how far Russian President Vladimir Putin would be willing to go to support his ally. Belarus is a strategically vital country for Russia, and is also a key concern for NATO, as it shares borders with Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, all members of the trans-Atlantic alliance. On the Trend Lines podcast this week, WPR columnist Candace Rondeaux joined Elliot Waldman to discuss some of the scenarios that could […]

The landmark agreement between Israel and the United Arab Emirates that was announced unexpectedly last week, a prelude to normalized diplomatic relations, is by any measure a triumph for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. But in the tumultuous, fractious landscape of Israeli politics, Netanyahu’s celebrations have been tempered by bitter recriminations at home, a reminder that in Israel, no win comes without wounds. In the deal, first made public by U.S. President Donald Trump, the United Arab Emirates agreed to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel in exchange for Israel’s suspension of plans to annex parts of the West Bank. The […]

For many Belarusians, Alexander Lukashenko is the only leader they’ve ever known. He has maintained a tight grip on the country since first becoming president in 1994, but Lukashenko now faces the greatest challenge yet to his rule. He claimed victory in a presidential election earlier this month that was widely decried as fraudulent, and took place amid a wave of pro-democracy protests across the country. The unrest has only grown after official election results showed Lukashenko winning around 80 percent of the vote. A bloody crackdown on protesters by security forces last week left at least two people dead […]

For most of the past decade, visions of the future of Hong Kong tended to fall into one of two starkly divided camps. The first, optimistic one held that the surprising resilience of Hong Kong’s civil society, including one example after another of massive and, until recently, overwhelmingly peaceful civil disobedience, would gradually bring Beijing around to the view that trying to impose tight controls over the city was not worth the devastating potential cost. Hong Kong, after all, had laid golden eggs for China for more than 20 years following Britain’s “handover” of the highly cosmopolitan and globalized outpost […]

OUAGADOUGOU, Burkina Faso—Daleba Nahounou was a university student in Abidjan, the largest city in Cote d’Ivoire, when a disputed presidential election in 2010 sent rival militias onto the streets.* The ensuing months of violence claimed 3,000 lives across the country and led to an international war crimes tribunal. “It was tragic,” Nahounou, who now helps lead a civil society organization called the Coalition of the Indignant of Cote d’Ivoire, told World Politics Review. “We have the same feeling that it could happen today.” Tensions are high in the country after President Alassane Ouattara, the opposition candidate and eventual victor in […]

At 8:07 a.m. on July 14, Daniel Lewis Lee was pronounced dead after being injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital. It marked the first time in 17 years that the U.S. government had carried out a federal death sentence, and was followed in quick succession by two more federal executions in the subsequent days. They took place almost a year after Attorney General William Barr announced that the Trump administration planned to restart capital punishment. Following a protracted legal battle and stays of execution by lower court judges, the Supreme Court vacated those orders last month, removing the final […]

There are many templates for achieving transitional justice, the broader purpose of which is to help a society reckon with a legacy of human rights abuses in the aftermath of dictatorship or conflict. These efforts might take the form of a criminal trial, a truth commission or a reparations program, in an effort to document horrific violations—and reckon with them. The specific goals of transitional justice have evolved over time. Early initiatives emphasized criminal justice, with the most well-known example being the post-World War II trials of German and Japanese war criminals. More recently, however, the purpose of transitional justice […]

In the week and a half since the catastrophic explosion at Beirut’s port, Lebanon’s Cabinet announced that it would resign, countries like France and the United States have promised to help rebuild, the Lebanese have seethed—and no one has been held accountable, except for a few port officials. “My government did this,” reads graffiti on a wall near the port, against a backdrop of the destruction. “You literally blew us up,” reads another message, spray-painted on a storefront nearby. At least 171 people were killed in the explosion, and thousands more were wounded. While the full cause of the blast […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, Andrew Green curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. An emergency cleanup operation has pumped the remaining oil from a Japanese ship that ran aground off Mauritius late last month, but the island nation is just beginning to grapple with the environmental and economic costs of the 1,000 tons of fuel that spilled off its coast. The MV Wakashio, which was en route from Singapore to Brazil, went off course and struck a coral reef about a mile southeast of Mauritius. The ship’s hull began to split open as it was […]

America needs a lot of things right now. It desperately needs leaders who can unify, not divide, its citizenry. It needs Congress to pass some form of pandemic relief bill, and it needed it yesterday. It needs a reprieve from the unrelenting toll taken on its soul by the coronavirus, a broken public health system, dysfunctional policing and entrenched inequality. Contrary, however, to the views espoused by some national security elites this week, what America does not need is for its military to solve the problem of President Donald Trump. It is hard to know what exactly was in the […]

Following the resignation of Elyes Fakhfakh as prime minister of Tunisia in mid-July, amid corruption allegations and after just five months in office, President Kais Saied designated one of his own advisers, Hichem Mechichi, as the new prime minister. Mechichi has until Aug. 25 to form a government that can win parliamentary approval. Should he fail, Saied has the constitutional right to call for new elections—an arduous task, particularly as Tunisia struggles with a deepening economic crisis and a spike in COVID-19 cases triggered by reopening the country’s borders in late June. Before he even takes office, Mechichi faces several […]

The news came unexpectedly last week, sending shockwaves across the country. Colombia’s powerful former president, Alvaro Uribe, was ordered by its Supreme Court to be put under house arrest. Colombians were in disbelief. It’s impossible to overstate the magnitude of Uribe’s role in the country’s politics over the past two decades. To some, he is a hero who saved the nation; to others, a murderous villain who trampled human rights. But everyone agrees, Uribe was and still is an outsized political force in Colombia. He seemed untouchable. Now, his detention creates two major tests for Colombia and its institutions. First, […]

ADDU, Maldives—Visitors are slowly returning to the famous beach resorts of this island nation in the Indian Ocean after it reopened its borders last month, having largely contained its initial wave of COVID-19. While it failed to avoid the virus entirely, the Maldives has registered a relatively small caseload of around 5,300, including 21 deaths, confined largely to its crowded capital, Male. In recent days, however, community transmission across the atolls has increased at an alarming pace. Around a third of the country’s estimated 550,000-strong population live in Male, on one of the most densely populated islands on the planet, […]

Editor’s Note: Guest columnist Steven Metz is filling in for Judah Grunstein this week. The Department of Homeland Security was created quickly in the traumatic year after the 9/11 attacks—a time when a fearful American public was desperate for anything that might make them safer. While the idea of an overarching organization to coordinate defending the U.S. homeland had floated around Washington for several years, 9/11 energized it. In November 2002, Congress passed the Homeland Security Act, combining 22 disparate federal departments and agencies linked only by their broad remit to deal with homeland security. Like many other actions undertaken […]

Amid its struggles with the public health and economic impacts of the coronavirus pandemic, the United Arab Emirates announced a wide-ranging restructuring of federal government agencies and senior personnel last month. The UAE’s prime minister and vice president, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, who rules the emirate of Dubai, detailed the shake-up in a series of tweets, saying it was intended to craft an “agile government quick in solidifying the achievement of our nation.” Previous government reshuffles in the small but wealthy Gulf nation were notable for their public relations aspects, such as the creation in 2016 of two […]

However one judges the results, there is no question that President Donald Trump has taken American trade policy in a very different direction than his predecessors going back decades. He has rejected multilateralism and severely weakened the World Trade Organization, while embracing the use of tariffs against allies and adversaries alike. Biden has been clear that, if elected, he would restore a more multilateral approach, especially with respect to challenging Chinese trade practices. He has also assured union supporters that he would put the interests of American workers at the core of his trade policy. Beyond those broad principles, however, […]