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Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. Over the past decade, social democratic parties across Western Europe have been in ignominious retreat. The center-left’s electoral decline has been remarkable. Even where social democrats have attained governmental power, often in coalition with other parties, their experience has been unhappy and often quickly followed by defeat. As a result, many commentators insist that social democracy as a social movement and a political tradition has lost its vitality and is destined to […]

Ukrainian soldiers muster at a point close to Luhansk, eastern Ukraine, Aug. 20, 2014 (AP photo by Petro Zadorozhnyy).

Ever since the 2004 “Orange Revolution” that led to its first turn toward the West, Ukraine’s future alignment between Russia and the Euro-Atlantic bloc has been the subject of much debate and speculation. The promise of a durable Western shift, already dimmed by 2010, receded even further under the presidency of Viktor Yanukovych, who tried to steer a middle course between Moscow and Brussels with some success until pressure from Brussels and Moscow, but also Ukraine’s pro-European public opinion, made nonalignment no longer tenable. Since the Euromaidan protests that drove Yanukovych from power in February 2014 and through the emergence […]

Independence Monument, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, June 17, 2015 (photo by Flickr user phalinn licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).

Cambodia’s July 2013 national elections were a watershed moment in the country’s recent political history. Amid charges of electoral fraud, long-ruling Prime Minister Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) was declared the winner of the polls by the National Election Committee. Despite the irregularities, the opposition Cambodian National Rescue Party (CNRP) still saw its support surge, winning 55 out of the 123 seats in parliament. The result represented an unprecedented loss of 22 seats for the CPP and prevented it from wielding the two-thirds majority necessary to amend Cambodia’s constitution. Following the announcement of the results, anti-government demonstrations in the […]

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Editor’s note: The following article is one of 30 that we’ve selected from our archives to celebrate World Politics Review’s 15th anniversary. You can find the full collection here. In London, a group of Americans meet at a fundraiser in a private home in support of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Across the Atlantic, in Maryland, the construction of a $100 million mosque complex is funded by Turkey’s Presidency of Religious Affairs, or Diyanet. In Canada, the Ukrainian Canadian Congress lobbies the government to strengthen its official aid to Ukraine, while urging individuals to directly support the Ukrainian army by donating for […]

A cab parks during a blockade by taxi drivers Paris, France, June 25, 2015 (AP photo by Bertrand Combaldieu).

June 2010, a start-up company in the Bay Area launched a new service to match riders with taxi cabs via a smartphone app. Today, just five years later, Uber operates in over 58 countries and 300 cities. Venture capitalists as well as investors such as Goldman Sachs, Google and the Chinese company Baidu have all poured in capital, with the company currently valued at $41 billion dollars. And even as it encounters violent protests in Paris and legal crackdowns elsewhere, Uber seems poised for still more growth. Some estimate that the company will generate revenues of $10 billion by the […]