Last week, Alexei Navalny, a Russian anti-corruption activist and blogger who gained a reputation as unofficial leader of the Russian opposition during protests against President Vladimir Putin, was freed on bail pending appeal of his five-year prison sentence on charges of embezzlement. Navalny now plans to run for mayor of Moscow, despite a prosecution many see as politically motivated. “The question still remains as to whether the movement can grow from ‘anti-Putin’ or ‘pro-Navalny’ to something with a real political program,” Sarah Oates, professor and senior scholar at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism and author of […]

Latin America holds lessons for understanding—and pointing the way through—the current upheaval in Egypt. As Egypt enters a new phase of polarization following the military intervention in the wake of massive protests against its elected leader, recent Latin American experience points to the risks of moving forward without addressing the roots of this polarization. It also shows some of the requirements for constructing a democratic bargain to overcome the social and political exclusion of important sectors of society. In Latin America, 13 leaders were forced to end their terms prematurely, without having been constitutionally impeached, between 1990 and 2009. Eight […]

On Wednesday, Gen. Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, Egypt’s military chief of staff, announced that the country’s elected president, Mohammed Morsi, had been removed from office. Egypt’s constitution will be suspended; Adly Mansour, the chief judge of the Constitutional Court, will temporarily assume the presidency and oversee a transitional government until new elections can be held at a date yet to be determined. The events of the “second Egyptian revolution” have effectively terminated the experiment as to whether the Muslim Brotherhood, having won parliamentary and presidential elections last year, would be able to construct a democratic regime. They now present the Obama administration […]

Vietnam’s prime minister, Nguyen Tan Dung, recently survived a confidence vote in the National Assembly as well as severe pressure at the most recent party plenum. As prime minister of a country ostensibly ruled by the Vietnamese Communist Party (VCP), he is theoretically subordinate to the Politburo, yet his personal political power has allowed him to continue in office. Due to the resulting political paralysis, however, policy across the board is in limbo. Foreign governments and businesses used to be able to expect that decisions backed by the Politburo of the VCP were enforceable. This is no longer the case. […]