Is the Middle East Different?

The Arab events of 2011 may have some similarities to the wave of popular upheavals against authoritarianism that swept the Soviet bloc starting in 1989, but the differences are much…

Iraq’s three elections in 2005 highlighted the role—but also the limits—of electoral-system design in managing potentially polarizing divisions.

Turkish state policy toward the Kurds, the Republic of Turkey’s largest ethnic minority, has evolved from denial and mandatory assimilation to cultural recognition to acknowledgement of the Kurds’ contested status…