Domestic Politics Archive

Whatever other misdeeds they may have committed, one would not think of either Evo Morales or Jeanine Anez as being a “terrorist.” Yet, however implausible the accusation may seem, being criminally investigated for “sedition and terrorism” in the past two years may be the only thing the two former Bolivian presidents have in common. After Morales resigned and fled the Andean nation in 2019 amid allegations of fraud in that year’s presidential election, the Justice Ministry under Anez’s interim presidency leveled the controversial charges against him, along with “genocide” for good measure. The indictment was based on both the socialist […]

One of the most important problems in modern African history is also among the most widely misunderstood. For decades, both journalists and scholars have lamented that Africa’s borders were drawn up by outside powers, beginning with Europe’s so-called Scramble for Africa, between 1881 and World War I. This threw all sorts of linguistically, religiously and politically disparate groups into newly formed colonies and, soon afterward, new African nations, in which they were suddenly forced to try to get along together in the task of building independent republics. The mistake in this logic isn’t that these things didn’t happen. If one […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only weekly newsletter, China Note, which includes a look at the week’s top stories and best reads from and about China. Subscribe to receive it by email every Wednesday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. Addressing a 70,000-strong crowd gathered at Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to mark the centennial of the Chinese Communist Party on Thursday, Chinese leader Xi Jinping delivered a defiant speech that seemed aimed as much toward Washington as toward the millions of Chinese households watching on television. “We have never bullied, oppressed, or […]

Rarely has an election in a small post-Soviet country been watched so closely.  Armenia held a snap poll on June 20, after months of turbulence following its crushing defeat in an unexpected six-week war with Azerbaijan over the long-disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh late last year. At times, the passions and pressure generated by the war’s outcome had been so intense that it looked as though the Armenian state would not survive. Yet not only did embattled Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan survive, he won a strong new mandate, against all odds.  The fighting last year killed more than 7,000 people in […]

Editor’s Note: This is the web version of our subscriber-only Weekly Wrap-Up newsletter, which uses relevant WPR coverage to provide background and context to the week’s top stories. Subscribe to receive it by email every Saturday. If you’re already a subscriber, adjust your newsletter settings to receive it directly to your email inbox. The Chinese Communist Party celebrated its 100th birthday Thursday, with the kind of grand pomp we’ve come to expect from Beijing for such occasions. The anniversary was an opportunity for Chinese leader Xi Jinping to vaunt the party’s accomplishments, particularly in lifting hundreds of millions of people […]

There are at least two ways in which the newly approved Congressional Select Committee on the events of Jan. 6 might go about investigating the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington on that day. One is to treat the assault as a one-off—an aberrant security breach in which thousands of people who supported former President Donald Trump stormed the seat of American democracy to protest the 2020 certification of election results that put President Joseph R. Biden in the White House. Another is to approach the mob violence that day as the culmination of a yearslong influence […]

On June 22, Mauritanian authorities arrested former President Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz as part of a corruption investigation that began in January 2020. The immediate trigger for Ould Abdel Aziz’s arrest was that he had refused to check in with a judge. As the case moves forward, the current administration led by President Mohamed Ould Ghazouani, a former ally of Ould Abdel Aziz, faces a dilemma: Allowing Ould Abdel Aziz to escape the charges would give the former president a symbolic political victory and would undermine the rule of law, but convicting him of corruption would raise the stakes in […]

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the creation of the Pacific Alliance, a Latin American regional trade bloc founded by Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Chile, with the hopes of expanding to others, such as Panama or Ecuador. The concept had been presented for the first time in 2006 by then-Peruvian President Alan Garcia Perez: a network of countries on the Pacific coast that could increase their trade with the Asia-Pacific through interregional agreements. When the Pacific Alliance was finally launched in April 2011, its members had conservative presidents that aligned politically and commercially with Washington. Other countries in the […]

Back in February, several weeks after Myanmar’s military ousted the elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi, I spoke on the phone with a 25-year-old researcher in Yangon, the country’s largest city. Having joined popular demonstrations against the coup, he said he was surprised at the scale of resistance to the new junta. The movement, which quickly became known as the Civil Disobedience Movement, had galvanized hundreds of thousands of nonviolent protesters across the country, as massive strikes at public agencies, banks and businesses threatened to grind government functioning and the economy to a halt. The researcher, who asked […]

One day in April 2016, the Zimbabwean pastor Evan Mawarire was sitting in his office, frustrated at the persistent economic crisis in his country that was making it difficult to provide for his family. So, he decided to vent. He took out his phone, propped it up against the Bible on his desk, and recorded a video in which he spoke about the symbolism of the Zimbabwean national flag, and how the promises of freedom and prosperity that it symbolizes had been violated by the regime of then-President Robert Mugabe. The video quickly went viral, inspiring a hashtag, #ThisFlag, and […]

Violations of democratic norms by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban are nothing new, but the explosion of anger in Europe against the anti-LGBTQ law just approved by the Hungarian parliament, dominated by Orban’s Fidesz Party, suggests Orban has crossed a critical red line. At last week’s European Union summit, no topic garnered more attention, or more fury, than the new law. If descriptions of what went on behind the scenes are accurate, Orban was berated with an uncommon degree of emotional intensity. Leaders of countries from across the EU lambasted Hungary’s self-described proponent of “illiberal democracy” in starkly personal terms—tears […]