دمکراسی و اصلاح

A graphical analysis shows that women have been losing ground in Turkey since the AKP government came to power in 2002. Despite an increasing -- though still small -- presence in parliament, women hold fewer executive and bureaucratic posts in government. As a consequence, Turkish women are being pushed out

Turkey's protracted political battle between the governing Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and its opponents reached a crescendo this month with the Turkish Parliament's vote on proposed constitutional amendments. The battle over the amendments represented the zenith of the country's dangerous polarization between two broad political camps congregated around

On May 11, 2010, Institute Keston Family fellow and director of Project Fikra J. Scott Carpenter cosigned an open letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton calling for stronger U.S. efforts to persuade the Egyptian regime to lift its state of emergency. The letter, drafted by the Carnegie Endowment

To the casual observer, Iraq's post-electoral political process might appear to be deadlocked or moving at a snail's pace. Although international observers validated the results of the March 7 election as largely free and fair, the outcome has been subjected to a series of ill-natured legal challenges. This will complicate

Thomas Friedman, William Kristol, Martin Kramer, and David Makovsky joined in a keynote discussion at The Washington Institute's 2010 Soref Symposium on April 22, 2010. The event honored the Institute's 25th anniversary. Thomas Friedman is chief foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times. He has won three Pulitzer Prizes

As the United States seeks to reduce its military presence in Iraq, the ambitious withdrawal timetable laid out by President Barack Obama becomes vulnerable to disruption by a number of strategic factors. Chief among these is a violent breakdown of relations between the federal government in Baghdad and the Kurdistan

Last week's arrests in Turkey of dozens of high-ranking military officers mark the country's latest step toward authoritarianism. Neither Europe nor the United States can afford to ignore Turkey's transformation. Since coming to power in 2002, the ruling Islamist Justice and Development Party, or AKP, and the ultra-conservative Fethullah Gulen

While all Iraqi political factions are competing strongly in lead up to the March 7 parliamentary elections, in Iraqi Kurdistan the internal competition is especially intense. In particular, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan (PUK, the more secular and less tribal of the two major Iraqi Kurdish political parties) stands to

Five years ago this month, Washington withdrew its ambassador to Damascus to protest the Assad regime's presumed role in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri. For the State Department, which instinctively believes in the power of diplomacy, yanking its top diplomat was equivalent to the nuclear option