Rather than addressing the trauma inflicted by genocidal violence, the ruling party has used a program of national ethnic unity and reconciliation to reinforce its political authority.

Eastern Europe remains poorer and less democratically experienced than Western Europe, but there are as many differences within the regions as between them.

[T]he principal opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), seems much better positioned than the Indian National Congress to win power in this year's elections.

If the second term of the left in Uruguay lives up to its promise, complementing the first term's performance, the country will have developed a signature social democratic experience in the global South.

If Europe continues to pull itself back from the brink of financial calamity and political instability, historians will write books not about how the radical right destroyed the European project but how elected officials checked populist influences and found a way to muddle through.

To embrace curbs on his own power, Putin would need to act as much out of character as Medvedev would need to act against instinct in order to confront his benefactor.

Thailand runs the risk that future protest, a right and a mainstay of liberal democracy, will escalate quickly into violence and eventually be constricted as a matter of course.

Once the 2010 election passes without any meaningful change, the real contest among rival political and ethnic forces will work itself out in the theater of armed rebellion.

Ending Robert Mugabe's purge of his country's human and physical capital will require more pressure smartly applied, particularly by neighboring nations.

Rajapaksa's patriotism merges nation and state, and it promotes a love of country based on a particular reading of the Sinhalese people's foundation myth, a reading in which all other groups … are present only as shadows.

Although the publics in Poland and Romania believe there are more similarities than differences in the quality of their lives after communism, external observers argue that Poland's democracy is qualitatively better than Romania's. The challenge is to explain why there is this difference when both countries are consolidated democracies inhabited by unsatisfied…democrats.

A shared experience of brutalization, abuse, and marginalization informs the worldview of these movements. Each has emerged, too, within the context of a deeply dysfunctional state.

What if the next generation of Al Qaeda has neither a central leadership nor a territorial base? If a terrorist organization could find a model for operating without its own Afghanistan, it would pose a different and perhaps more difficult set of challenges for counterterrorist forces.

Russia and India can argue that without their support, the United Front would have not defeated the Taliban…. Because of this instrumental support, India and Russia will undoubtedly expect to have a voice in Afghanistan's future.