authoritarianism in MENA

In contrast, Europe’s eastern and southern neighbors, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Near East, provide many examples of churches and mosques standing side by side. Most certainly not more democratic or liberal than Western Europe, Russia and the Muslim countries of the Middle East are more accustomed to and accepting of religious diversity and its architectural representations. A bewildering variety of Christian denominations and their churches adorn the Syrian landscape, and I was pleasantly surprised to find churches along with synagogues and mosques in Moscow and elsewhere in present-day Russia, despite the pervasive anti-Semitism and Islamophobia found in that country. Even in Turkey, where, as a result of nationalism, discriminatory policies and multiple wars in the first half of the 20th century, only a very small Christian minority remains today, one can nonetheless find hundreds of churches relatively intact. A comparison with the vanished mosques and minarets of Hungary, Greece, Spain, Sicily, Romania, Serbia and elsewhere in Europe is inescapable.

The KOF Index of Globalization measures the three main dimensions of globalization: economic social and political. In addition to three indices measuring these dimensions, we calculate an overall index of globalization and sub-indices referring to actual economic flows economic restrictions data on information flows data on personal contact and data on cultural proximity. Data are available on a yearly basis for 208 countries over the period 1970 - 2007.

the regime is quietly clamping down on some of the nation's best students by derailing their academic and professional careers

In most places, being a star means ranking top of the class, but in Iran it means your name appears on a list of students considered a threat by the intelligence ministry. It also means a partial or complete ban from education.

Ms. Karimi says she thinks she got starred because she volunteered in the presidential campaign of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi last spring. She also participated in several antigovernment "Green Movement" protests that are convulsing Iran. "They tell me, 'You are not allowed to study or work in this country any more.' Why? Because I voted for Mousavi and wore a green scarf?"

Pakistan’s security agencies have left us no political way forward. They have radicalised all the liberal forces by torturing them

Not long ago, the student was a patriotic Pakistani. He had a poster of a war hero, Captain Karnel Sher Khan as a teenager. “Pakistan needs to reflect upon what made me hate Pakistan”, he said. “They make us feel that we are slaves. I can wear western clothes and move freely in the city but if I’m wearing my baggy Baloch shalwar, they’ll strip search me.”

many Baloch nationalists are socialists and abhor religious fundamentalism. “There is no solution with packages, and our problem can’t be solved with dialogues either. Our ideology is different from Pakistan’s. We can’t live under an imposed and fake religious identity. We are secular people

the country’s democracy, its rule of law and its freedom of expression are at stake.

In an extensive study of the case for the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute, a Washington research institute affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, Gareth Jenkins, a Turkey specialist, noted the pervasive fear among Western analysts of Turkey that Ergenekon “represents a major step, not, as its proponents maintain, towards the consolidation of pluralistic democracy in Turkey, but towards an authoritarian one-party state.”