The international community may be experiencing a case of compassion fatigue when it comes to the violence currently gripping Haiti. But it is hardly an excuse. While much of Haiti’s misery is homegrown, the roots of its troubles extend beyond the island, and the reverberations from its crises always breach its borders.
In the aftermath of Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan last week, much of the commentary in the U.S. has been on the visit’s impact on U.S.-China relations. Unfortunately, the reactions within Taiwan and China have attracted less attention, as they are revealing of domestic factors driving decision-making on both sides of the strait.
Peace in Bosnia has been bought at a high price for the EU and the local population. In ignoring growing signs of corruption, the EU allowed structural dysfunction to fester. The system put in place by the Dayton Agreement may have been necessary to end war in the 1990s. But 30 years later, Bosnia is a different place.
The outcome of Senegal’s legislative elections, in which President Macky Sall’s coalition lost its majority, potentially curb Sall’s rumored ambitions for a constitutionally prohibited third term. But the runup to the polls put the spotlight on the state of democracy in a West African country regarded as a regional outlier.
With polls showing that he may lose by a wide margin in Brazil’s Oct. 2 presidential election, President Jair Bolsonaro is setting the stage to claim fraud and have his supporters protest his loss. More troubling, Bolsonaro has hinted that elements of the military and police will back his efforts.
Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen will run for a second term in the country’s presidential election in October, after five years of leading the country through back-to-back crises. Scandal and tumult are now roiling other parts of the national government, and yet Austrian voters look set to reelect Van der Bellen.
At least 32 people were killed in a July 29 attack by suspected cattle thieves in a village approximately 47 miles north of Antananarivo, Madagascar’s capital. While the country’s president has vowed to bring the killers to justice, the roots of Madagascar’s cattle theft problem date back decades and defy obvious solutions.
For the eighth time in 11 years, voters have been called to the ballot box to weigh in on Tunisia’s future. Over the past decade, Tunisians have chosen new presidents, fresh parliaments and local representatives in peaceful elections. But last week’s referendum, which approved a new constitution, may bring an end to that civic process.
The remarkable developments in Sri Lanka, in which a monthslong citizen mobilization led to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s resignation last month, would have been unthinkable until recently. But while Rajapaksa’s resignation realized part of the protesters’ demands, there is still a long way to go for systemic change.
A video depicting a chained woman in a dark shack in the Chinese city of Xuzhou went viral, racking up more than 1.9 billion views on Chinese social media. But the reaction by authorities to the video show how online outrage is often corralled and stripped of its more systemic critiques of the state.
At the heart of Turkey’s cycles of escalation against real or imagined enemies at home and abroad are two core dynamics eroding the power structures Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has used to dominate Turkish politics for 20 years: economic mismanagement and the accelerating fragmentation of Erdogan’s electoral coalition.
The political impasse in Iraq has reached an ominous phase that underscores the danger of litigating politics through displays of force. And in Lebanon, the many twists and turns in its deadlocked politics demonstrate that negotiation through violence can give way to a sustainable—if bloody—alternative to civic democracy.
Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari, who is set to leave office next year after having served two terms, recently declared that he will leave the country “in a better place” than he found it. But his claim is at odds with the situation across the country, including a deepening insecurity that now grips Abuja, Nigeria’s capital.
Mario Draghi’s resignation as Italy’s prime minister on July 21 threw Rome into political turmoil yet again. With campaigning ahead of snap elections on Sept. 25 already in gear, the big question now is what comes next for Italy, especially if the elections result in a far-right party taking the helm of a coalition government.
Argentine President Alberto Fernandez has spent his entire term renegotiating and re-renegotiating the terms of the country’s debt, a process that has seen two economy ministers leave office. No politician on the left, center or right wants to make the necessary, but unpopular, decisions the economy needs.