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Tunisia is often considered a success story compared to other Arab countries caught up in the popular uprisings of 2011. Unlike Syria and Libya, it has been spared armed conflict. And unlike Egypt, which is descending deeper into authoritarianism, it has implemented impressive democratic reforms. Yet such comparisons risk overlooking the many ways in which Tunisia is still fragile eight years after protests toppled longtime President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. As Francisco Serrano notes in this week’s in-depth report for WPR, the security forces are struggling to counter the threat posed by Islamist extremists based near the border with […]

As Christians around the world were flocking to churches for Easter services Sunday, Sri Lanka was already in mourning. A string of deadly, coordinated explosions early Sunday, which tore through churches and luxury hotels in Colombo and across the island nation, killed over 321 people, including some 38 foreigners, and injured around 500 others. Seven of the eight attacks were suicide bombings. A ninth explosion was prevented late Sunday when security personnel defused an improvised explosive device on the road to Colombo International Airport. Among the churches attacked on Sunday morning was the 18th-century St. Anthony’s Shrine in Colombo, St. […]

History’s judgment of the Trump administration’s foreign policy is likely to be unkind, with the biggest question for now being whether it is the intended or unintended consequences that will warrant the most severe rebuke. There are plenty of examples of how the administration’s approach risks both catastrophic success and catastrophic failure, but its policy on Iran is particularly illustrative. The latest case in point is the announcement Monday that the U.S. would not extend the waivers it had granted to five major importers of Iranian crude after reimposing unilateral sanctions on Iran’s oil sector last year. The countries—China, India, […]

President Ibrahim Solih’s Maldivian Democratic Party scored a historic victory in parliamentary elections in the Maldives earlier this month, winning 65 of 87 seats in the legislature, known as the People’s Majlis. Those results clear the way for Solih’s attempts to account for the debts incurred by his corrupt and autocratic predecessor, Abdulla Yameen, who courted hundreds of millions of dollars in Chinese infrastructure investment during his time as president and is now facing money laundering charges. In an interview with WPR, David Brewster, a senior research fellow at the Australian National University’s National Security College, discusses the significance of […]

With its allusions to a planned economy and proletarian internationalism, Cuba’s 1976 constitution was unmistakably a product of the Cold War. Perhaps that’s why the island’s new leaders, led by President Miguel Diaz-Canel, moved quickly to recodify the country’s founding charter. A new constitution, which was formally adopted earlier this month, is Diaz-Canel’s first major accomplishment since his inauguration last year and should set the tone for the remainder of his tenure. Cuban authorities appear to have consulted many other countries’ constitutions in redrafting their own, and one country stands out: China. Although there is no sign that China had […]

Until Jan. 23, 2017, the United States had a major free trade agreement with Japan and 10 other countries called the Trans-Pacific Partnership. But on his first day in office, President Donald Trump withdrew from the TPP, which had been signed just a few months earlier by President Barack Obama as his signature piece of trade policy. Trump was fulfilling one of his first campaign promises, having railed against the deal for years. At the signing of his Executive Order pulling the U.S. out of the TPP, Trump declared that it was a “great thing for the American worker, what […]

KASSERINE, Tunisia—The blast that claimed the life of Cherifa Hilali was likely meant for a soldier, not a civilian. One day in May 2016, Hilali, 40, was out picking rosemary on Mount Semmama, an area near the border with Algeria where Islamist extremists routinely battle Tunisian security forces, when a land mine detonated. The explosion killed her and another woman and left a third woman injured. “They were walking through a trail normally used by the military,” Hilali’s husband, Makki Hilali, told me when I met him in February. Rising up from fields of olive trees and cacti, Mount Semmama […]

With each successive Earth Day, the scale of the global environmental crisis becomes more disheartening. So too does the collective failure to respond to the planet’s plight. Over the past year, scientists have issued dire warnings about global warming, mass extinction, the extent of plastic pollution and the death of the world’s oceans. Humanity is now deep in the Anthropocene, a new geologic era defined by the human transformation of the natural world, and the lights are blinking red. In a harrowing report last October, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, warned that even a 2 […]

Not much remains of the “pink tide” of leftist governments that swept across Latin America in the 2000s, riding the long commodities boom. After the boom came the bust, and with it widespread voter dissatisfaction. Where free elections have been held, most of the region has subsequently swung to the right. There are, of course, some exceptions, most notoriously in Venezuela. President Nicolas Maduro, who came to office in 2013 as the handpicked successor of the leader who launched the wave, Hugo Chavez, continues to preside over one of the worst economic and humanitarian disasters in recent Latin American history. […]

The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan held a summit meeting in Vienna last month, their fourth face-to-face meeting in six months. The two countries’ foreign ministers have also held several rounds of talks, including a meeting this week in Moscow, heightening expectations for progress on resolving the frozen conflict over the disputed region of Nagorno-Karabakh. But while there have been some tentative signs of progress, the two sides still differ fundamentally on how they view the conflict over the territory, which broke away from Azerbaijan before the collapse of the Soviet Union and has been under de facto Armenian administration […]

Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. It’s been more than eight months since the Democratic Republic of Congo announced the first cases in its current Ebola outbreak, which has become the worst in the country’s history. According to the World Health Organization’s latest situation report, published Tuesday, the outbreak has resulted in more than 1,200 cases and more than 800 deaths. Yet when President Felix Tshisekedi traveled this week to eastern Congo, where the outbreak is unfolding, he bore a message that underscored how not […]

In this week’s editors’ discussion episode of the Trend Lines podcast, WPR’s editor-in-chief Judah Grunstein, managing editor Frederick Deknatel and associate editor Elliot Waldman analyze the impact of the Mueller report and how it will affect Trump’s foreign policy agenda. They also discuss why the United States has been unable to mount an effective response to the “active measures” Russia has taken to interfere with U.S. elections. If you like what you hear on Trend Lines and what you’ve read on WPR, you can sign up for our free newsletter to get our uncompromising analysis delivered straight to your inbox. […]

The election of Zuzana Caputova as Slovakia’s first female president last month was a landmark in more ways than one. The win by the 45-year-old lawyer and activist represented a liberal turn in Central Europe, where right-leaning, populist governments have been in power for several years. Much of the news coverage since Caputova’s victory has framed Slovakia as a great liberal hope that could push back populism and resurgent nationalism in the region, if not across the continent. But can this small state, which has endured political upheaval over the past year, really deliver on that lofty promise? The election […]

During his presidential bid, Donald Trump hammered on about the threat posed to America by the self-styled Islamic State, and how he would defeat it. As an issue, it was perfect for him, since the Islamic State’s sociopathic brutality fueled fear and anger among his core supporters—emotions that candidate Trump was able to harness and use to his benefit. Although the Islamic State emerged from the insurgency in Iraq that was unleashed by the American invasion in 2003, the extremist group grew more powerful during President Barack Obama’s administration, so Trump could wield it as a political weapon against Obama […]

The Trump administration yesterday announced a number of new sanctions and restrictions on dealing with Cuba, including new limits on remittances and nonfamily travel to the island from the United States. In a reversal of more than two decades of U.S. policy, the administration also said it would allow Cuban Americans whose property was seized during the Cuban revolution to sue foreign companies operating on that property. A law passed in 1996 had originally allowed such claims, but that provision in the law had been waived by every president, until now. To understand the implications of this move, WPR spoke […]

Last month, South American leaders, many of them politically conservative, gathered in Chile to launch a new regional body. Although they didn’t say it, they had come to bury Unasur, or the Union of South American Nations, the left-leaning bloc that has been led by Venezuela since its founding a little over a decade ago. They hoped that their new group, the Forum for Progress in South America, or Prosur, would set the stage for a new era of integration and cooperation in the Southern Cone. But critics were quick to predict the new group’s demise, arguing that the fledgling […]

MADRID—Europeans will elect a new European Parliament in May, but how many of them really know what it does? The continued lack of common knowledge across Europe about the European Union and how its byzantine governance institutions actually function is a challenge for political parties and their candidates. It is why these races have typically revolved around domestic issues. This time, however, populist and euroskeptic parties are bringing some EU issues into the debate, such as migration, but as a way to criticize the EU, not constructively engage with it. They have a receptive audience, as they are poised to […]