Not long ago, Chinese authorities detained Xu Zhiyong, a prominent civil rights advocate, for “assembling a crowd to disrupt order in a public place,” despite the fact that he had been under house arrest for over three months. Although the incident comes as little...
Kurdistan has enjoyed an unprecedented level of political and economic stability since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Yet not all is well in Kurdistan, due in part to the dominant presence of one ruling family. Descended from a political dynasty that has built a power base over centuries of fighting, regional president Massoud Barzani has blossomed into an authoritarian ruler not unlike many whose regimes are now crumbling from the internal pressures of the Arab Spring.
Afghanistan, which manages to generate only about $2 billion per year of its own revenues and depends on international donors for the rest of its budget, suffers from a kind of resource curse. With plenty of cash and no accountability to citizens—as well as minimal oversight by donors—Afghan officials are free to rip off donor resources and ignore or extort their fellow citizens with relative impunity.
Although the breathtaking violence that attended Iraq’s descent into sectarian nightmare has been well documented in many retrospectives on the 10-year-old war, what’s often overlooked is that by far more mundane standards, the United States did a spectacularly poor job of governing Iraq.
The conclave to elect the new Pope was an opportunity for the Catholic Church’s all-male college of cardinals to choose someone who would lead the Church into the 21st century. As they did when they elevated Joseph Ratzinger to his role as Pope Benedict XVI eight years ago, they flubbed the opportunity.
Somalia is, on paper, a sovereign state. But for the past two decades, beset by endless civil strife, secessionism, and regionalism, it has been anything but. The international community has acted as a de-facto caretaker of Somali affairs in the absence of a credible central government, with troops from African states continuing to provide security assistance. But this has begun to change.
Governmental corruption is a huge issue in many of the countries that the United States seeks to influence. Afghanistan is only one of the more notable cases in which corruption is rampant. America has put millions into USAID and State Department projects designed to combat corruption, but there is very little to show for its efforts. To date, no high-level corruption prosecution has gone forward in Afghanistan.
Although the war in Afghanistan—with its tally of U.S. combat deaths now exceeding 2,000—has largely faded from the news, it is useful to consider why the conflict is so intractable. Why has a campaign that initially seemed so hopeful resulted in a country that is politically fractured and increasingly deadly for Afghans and foreign militaries alike?
Weeks after Mexico’s presidential elections, thousands of people have turned out to protest the declared winner, Enrique Peña Nieto, and the imminent return to power of the party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which is slated to take office December 1, now faces increasing accusations of fraud, a legal demand to declare the elections invalid, and a youth movement that refuses to go away.
John F. Kennedy essentially bought his way into politics. His father, the wealthy Joseph Kennedy, picked out a nice congressional seat in Massachusetts and basically paid the occupant of the position to step down and run instead for the Boston mayoralty. JFK’s father then tried to pay off the Democratic frontrunner to drop out of the race, and when that didn’t work, persuaded William Randolph Hearst not to run any of the candidate’s ads or pictures in Hearst-owned newspapers. Joe Kennedy even paid a janitor named Joseph Russo to run in the race in order to dilute support for another leading candidate named Joseph Russo. Recognizing the importance of PR, the Kennedy family contributed $600,000 – an enormous sum in 1946 – for a children’s hospital in the district where JFK was running for office.