Radical Movements Archive

According to the latest poll, released Wednesday, on the British referendum on European Union membership, 45 percent of Britons are in favor of remaining in the EU, while 38 percent are in favor of leaving. While the “remain” camp maintains a significant lead, support for the so-called Brexit is growing, with the “leave” campaign gaining 2 percent in the past month. In Scotland, the story is different. According to the same poll, over 56 percent of Scots want to remain in the EU. Pro-EU sentiment in Scotland has been consistent over the past eight months, with some polls putting support […]

Two years ago, the Egyptian people spared no adjective in praise of their savior, Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi, who in turn framed his lightning-fast rise to power as an expression of the people’s will. When he was named defense minister in 2012 by Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader elected Egypt’s president that year, el-Sisi vowed to keep the military out of politics. But the general, with strong popular support, eventually overthrew Morsi in 2013. He then retired his military post and announced he was running for president, winning in a landslide the following year. But now the honeymoon is over. The […]

In the first round of presidential elections on Sunday, Norbert Hofer, the candidate from the far-right Freedom Party, came in first place with 36 percent of the vote; Alexander Van der Bellen, former chairman of the Green Party who ran as an independent, came in second with 20 percent. In an email interview, Thomas Meyer, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna, discussed the elections and the state of politics in Austria. WPR: What explains the failure of the centrist People’s Party and the center-left Social Democrats to make it into the second round of presidential elections, and what […]

In March, the small West African nation of Benin announced that it would contribute 150 soldiers to the Multinational Joint Task Force (MNTJF), a West African coalition whose main mission is to fight the militant group Boko Haram. The task force has approximately 9,000 total troops, but nevertheless it is primarily a political prop rather than an integrated military outfit. The region’s national militaries largely pursue their own campaigns, while the optics of regional integration serve a political purpose: They explicitly support narratives about so-called African solutions to African problems, yet implicitly facilitate greater Western involvement in the fight against […]

On Jan. 1, 2016, Saudi Arabia executed Nimr al-Nimr, a prominent Shiite cleric, stoking outrage in the region and beyond. His death, and the backlash that followed, highlighted long-simmering tensions both within Saudi Arabia and between Riyadh and Tehran. News of al-Nimr’s death triggered virulent protests in Iran, with demonstrators setting ablaze the Saudi Embassy in Tehran; Saudi Arabia subsequently severed diplomatic relations with Iran. The response illustrated how Saudi Arabia’s troubled relationship with its Shiite minority could rapidly inflame intercommunal and international relations in the Persian Gulf. Historically, Saudi Arabia’s Shiite communities were concentrated in what is today the […]

When the leaders of the self-styled Islamic State (ISIS) take stock of their movement, they must like some of what they see. Affiliates of the group are cropping up across the Islamic world, and the organization has proved adept at recruiting or inspiring alienated young Muslims—many with criminal backgrounds—to commit murder in Europe and North America. But there are also things that must concern the group’s leaders. In the past few months, Iraqi and Kurdish forces have taken back 40 percent of the territory the Islamic State had conquered over the past two years. American airstrikes have killed 25,000 of […]

The Philippines’ upcoming presidential election in May comes at a critical time for Southeast Asia’s second-most-populous country and fifth-largest economy. After decades of anemic growth rates, the Philippines seems to have begun to turn a corner over the past six years under reform-minded President Benigno Aquino III. Yet as Filipinos prepare to go to the polls, it is unclear if the next government will be able to both sustain the progress made thus far as well as confront challenges old and new in the political, economic and security realms. Breaking With the Past Although the Philippines has been a democracy […]

Russia’s North Caucasus insurgency has gone relatively quiet, but reduced casualty numbers belie a still-worrying situation where long-standing grievances remain. As more and more fighters join the cause of globalized jihadi groups, most of all the self-declared Islamic State (ISIS), Moscow may find that it has only transformed and widened its war. A thwarted suicide bombing outside a police station near the Northern Caucasus city of Stavropol on Monday was the latest sign. Adding to the threat is the fear of blowback at home of previously dormant ISIS-inspired terrorist cells. This comes after a remarkable reduction of violence in Europe’s […]

Security officials from South Sudanese President Salva Kiir’s government allegedly attacked and detained 16 members of rebel leader and former Vice President Riek Machar’s publicity team Tuesday. The publicity team was in Juba in advance of Machar’s return to South Sudan’s capital on April 18, when he is set to assume the office of vice president again in a unity government with Kiir as part of a fledgling peace deal. Tuesday’s violence is only the latest round of renewed fighting in South Sudan. The U.S. State Department issued a statement Monday condemning recent attacks on rebels in the northwest of […]

The recent terrorist attacks in Belgium exposed critical deficiencies in Europe’s intelligence agencies. Soon after the attacks in late March, the Turkish government announced that, in July 2015, it had arrested Ibrahim El Bakraoui, a Belgian responsible for the Brussels airport bombing, and deported him to the Netherlands after determining that he intended to join the self-proclaimed Islamic State. European authorities never followed up. It was just the latest sign of the European Union and Turkey’s failure to cooperate on counterterrorism since the outset of the Syrian conflict. For close to three years, the European Union withheld from Turkey the […]

A specter is haunting American politics—the specter of terrorism. As the self-styled Islamic State added transnational terrorism to its repertoire, it inspired or directed terrorist attacks in both Europe and the United States. There will almost certainly be more attacks to come. The fear of those attacks is adding to the turmoil that already characterizes American politics and, combined with intense political partisanship, pushing the political system in some very dark directions. This is by design: The architects of terrorism deliberately stoke fear, using it to attain psychological effects that far exceed their actual ability to kill or destroy. They […]

BEIRUT—Syria’s nationwide cessation of hostilities has made clear the growing rift between the country’s mainstream opposition and the Nusra Front, al-Qaida’s Syrian affiliate. But just as the cease-fire has highlighted these maybe irreconcilable differences, it has also shown the extent to which the Nusra Front is tangled up in and ultimately dependent on the rest of the Syrian opposition. The Nusra Front often sells itself as the beginning and end of the fight against the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad. But Nusra cannot win single-handedly. It is a symbiote—it can only succeed when it is attached to a Syrian opposition […]

Since assuming power in 1999, Russian President Vladimir Putin has used rising income from gas and oil exports not only to rebuild the Russian military from its post-Soviet nadir, but also to spur the evolution of new tactics and capabilities blending cyberwar, support to proxy forces, special operations and conventional operations. Like Washington, Moscow recognized that the primary security threat in the opening decades of the 21st century was not major conventional war but a complex web of state weakness, political extremism, terrorism, insurgency and transnational crime. Russia’s military interventions in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria and elsewhere demonstrate that Putin has […]

Slovakia’s coalition government, made up of Prime Minister Robert Fico’s center-left Smer-Social Democracy party, the nationalist Slovak National Party and two other parties, was sworn in late last month following parliamentary elections that left Fico without an outright majority. In an email interview, Sean Hanley, senior lecturer in comparative Central and East European politics at the University College London’s School of Slavonic and East European Studies, discusses Slovakia’s elections and prospects for the coalition government. WPR: What explains the electoral shifts in the latest election, including declining support for Prime Minister Robert Fico’s center-left Smer-Social Democracy Party and increased support […]