Women, and women's rights, were at the center—not the margins—of Tunisia's revolution.

[T]urning the page on decades of conflict and underdevelopment in the Horn of Africa will require … democratization and the institutionalization of transparent, accountable governance.

[T]he essential story of Georgian politics is a gradual, long-term trend: the slow growth in popular expectations of an accountable government that engages in fair economic and political play.

A continuation of past redistributive policies in the post—Arab Spring period is not a viable option.

An old debate that pits democratic values against Asian traditions of strongman rule and preferences for economic progress over political reform still resonates in the region.

Stable democracy does not depend on a rigid set of preconditions, and has emerged in many surprising circumstances.

While restlessness with democracy has grown in many places, authoritarian rule generally elicits greater unease if not disgust.

The third wave of democracy did sweep across much of sub-Saharan Africa in the 1990s, but has now subsided, except for ripples and eddies.

China's one-party state is here to stay, many observers agree. Then again, Samuel Huntington in 1984 assessed the odds of regime change in the communist world as “virtually nil.”

The underlying lesson of September 11 is that the United States can no longer defer the hard decisions. The overwhelming tragedy of the attacks has provided a mandate to change business as usual in American foreign policy and work on constructing a positive and enduring relationship between the United States and the Islamic world.

Putin appears to have more in common with Brezhnev than with his more decisive predecessors. Khrushchev, Gorbachev, and Yeltsin risked their positions in attempts to de-Stalinize the Soviet Union. … Putin's rule seems to be more pause than reform, which is, incidentally, what the public wants.

China's coercive system still shows a capacity to suppress individuals deemed threatening to the state. Beneath the surface, this system is facing unprecedented challenges to central control, effectiveness, and discipline, all of which could produce a growing crisis of governability for Beijing.

The story of the election of Mexico's first opposition president in 71 years is also the story of the birth of an increasingly energized civil society and the missteps of an intransigent and sclerotic ruling party.

The grand social and ideological systems that people construct for themselves invariably carry large consequences, for the environment no less than for more strictly human affairs. Among the swirl of ideas, policies, and political structures of the twentieth century, the most ecologically influential were the growth imperative and the (not unrelated) security anxiety that together dominated policy around the world. … By 1970, however, something new was afoot.