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Tunisia basically has a choice ahead: whether to continue as the IMF’s, the World Bank’s and Europe’s alleged best pupil in the Arab classroom, with the mixed resultsthat are plain for everyone to see, or to decide for itself, according to its own interests and sovereign decisions, what path and what policies to adopt, whether it be in the foreign policy, domestic policy or economic policy fields. Tunisia can chose to be like Turkey, Brazil, India or Malaysia, or it can pursue in its post-colonial striving for acceptance and the occasional pat on the head by its Western partners, a path followed by Jordan or Morocco with limited success.

For all practical purposes, this is the kind of government that Benali could have appointed himself had he had more brains – his last speech actually outlined exactly this sort of government, and he actually met with some opposition members before being deposed.

The Tunisian people have ousted the dictator, but they haven’t yet got rid of his institutional and political legacy. This is just the beginning, if democracy is to take hold.

Second, as opposed to their more famous totalitarian cousins, these authoritarian rulers did not rely on political mobilization. While some leaders, like Salazar and Franco, distrusted mass politics and actively promoted public apathy, others, like Dollfuss and Metaxas, tried and failed to accumulate a mass following. Others, including Vargas, approached political mobilization cautiously. Despite some populist tendencies, including a healthy dose of regime propaganda, Vargas never formed a political party or mass movement and even went so far as to ban all organized political activity in Brazil in 1937.

power was located in the dreary upper reaches of the bureaucracy (sometimes joined by the security apparatus) rather than in any political party

Sisi appears to take charge of an Egyptian state that has pulled leading institutions (army, religious apparatus and so on) together. While he may direct national policy in a broad sense, he seems to lack the tools or the interest to build a system in which all of these bodies answer directly and constantly to him.

Policymakers who face unfamiliar challenges often turn to the past. The problem is they don’t see the messy questions that historians do but, instead, a warehouse of analogies providing easy answers. That seductive simplicity can lead them badly astray.

The actual events of the Chernobyl disaster that took place 35 years ago have been transmuted into a fable about how the revelation of a calamity can undermine an authoritarian regime. That story has led to a ceaseless search for how any disaster in an authoritarian system opposed to the United States presages the imminent defeat of U.S. adversaries from within. It’s an analogy that instructs U.S. policymakers of the fragility of other systems and the inherent superiority of their own. In doing so, it absolves them of any need to shore up the foundations of their own system or prepare for long-term coexistence with a resilient authoritarian rival.

relying on analogical reasoning clutters rather than clarifies thinking about international relations and foreign policy.

Millions of people are being pushed towards hunger by the coronavirus pandemic, which could end up killing more people through lack of food than from the illness itself, Oxfam has warned.

Closed borders, curfews and travel restrictions have disrupted food supplies and incomes in already fragile countries, forcing an extra million people closer to famine in Afghanistan and heightening the humanitarian disaster in Yemen, where two-thirds already live in hunger.

Oxfam said that up to 12,000 people could die from hunger every day globally – 2,000 more than died from Covid-19 each day in April

Tunisia said on Saturday that it intends to join the BRICS countries bloc of emerging economies that includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa.

“We will accept no dictates or interference in Tunisia’s internal affairs. We are negotiating the terms, but we refuse to receive instructions and the EU’s agenda,”

Mabrouk described the BRICS nations as “a political, economic and financial alternative that will enable Tunisia to open up to the new world.”