Democracy & Reform

If Washington is not going to compel Asad to step down, the least it can do is help protect those Syrians brave enough to continue to call for change themselves.

U.S. policy toward the Asad regime could be affected by the recent indictment of a Syrian American for spying on U.S.-based opposition figures, especially if both governments respond with diplomatic expulsions.

On October 3, 2011, Abdel Monem Said Aly, David Schenker, and Nabeel Khoury addressed a Policy Forum at The Washington Institute. Dr. Aly is president of the al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo and a Senior Fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis

Progress on the economic and political fronts is helping to insulate the monarchy from the instability currently sweeping the region.

Washington needs to deepen its involvement in an increasingly unstable Yemen.

Given Egypt's fluid post-revolutionary environment, Washington must be judicious as to when and how it attempts to exert influence on the domestic political scene.

A new royal decree giving women the right to vote can't hide the decay in the House of Saud.

In Bahrain, the struggle between Sunnis and Shiites -- and their respective patrons, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- enters a new phase with this weekend's parliamentary by-elections.

Testimony before the House Subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia. The Islamic Republic of Iran continues to be among the foremost countries in the world that systematically abuse human rights. The mechanisms of suppression in Iran have become so sophisticated that many of them are invisible. For instance