Comparative Politics

Police in Italy say they raided the homes of 19 people who allegedly wanted to create an "openly pro-Nazi, xenophobic and anti-Semitic" party.Officers found firearms and propaganda celebrating Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and fascist dictator Benito Mussolini during the series of raids across the country

Authorities had been monitoring "extreme right-wing local militants" during a two-year investigation led by the Anti-Mafia and Antiterrorism District of the Prosecutors Office of Caltanissetta and identified a "vast and jagged galaxy of subjects" who shared the same "ideological fanatism," police said.

one of the trainers in the group was a former senior member of the Calabrian mafia organization known as Ndrangheta and had been a former representative for the Forza Nuova neo-fascist party in the western region of Liguria

former chief of staff of Malta’s government was arrested over the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia on Wednesday as suspects reportedly began pointing the finger at each other and opposition MPs renewed calls for the prime minister to resign

Mr Schembri resigned after he was reportedly named as a “person of interest” in the investigation by Yorgen Fenech, a multi-millionaire businessman who was arrested last week as he tried to leave Malta on his luxury yacht. Both have denied any wrongdoing. 

Maltese police have not said why Mr Schembri is under arrest or whether he is a suspect in the murder, which shook the former British colony to the core and raised questions in Europe about the rule of law on the island

Despite the collapse of its so-called "caliphate" in the Middle East, and the killing of its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria, however, ISIL remains a growing and evolving threat in other parts of the world, especially in Africa's restive Sahel region. The Islamic State in the Greater Sahara (ISGS), the prodigy of ISIL there, is going from strength to strength, bolstering its membership and carrying out attacks.

Most of the states that have territory in the Sahel are grappling with the destructive effects of climate change, poverty, food shortages, ethnic conflicts and lack of effective democratic governance. There is little opportunity for the people in the region to receive an education and find work that would allow them to sustain their families. Moreover, they live in fear of being attacked by one of the numerous local armed groups that are active there. This is causing many to embark on perilous journeys across the Mediterranean to reach Europe's shores and seek sanctuary there. All this creates an ample opportunity for terror groups like ISIL to expand their influence over the region.

Burkina Faso is now stuck in a vicious cycle where the problems that allowed armed groups like ISIL to infiltrate the country are being exacerbated by their presence, while the resulting desperation is causing more people to join them.

Reading Turkish news is anything but boring. For example, in your morning scan of the Turkish news networks, you may be bombarded with videos depicting a “baby who did a military salute the moment he was born.” The video of the baby — whose umbilical cord was still intact — saluting made the headlines of several pro-government news networks five weeks after the launch of Operation Peace Spring. The report concluded with the oft-repeated dictum: “Another Turk is born a soldier!”

he militarization of Turkish society is forging ahead at full speed. Since the July 2016 coup attempt, Turks have been bombarded with images of the military. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ministers periodically pose and salute in military uniforms

It has become the norm for politicians in the lower ranks of the Justice and Development Party (AKP) to give speeches in military uniforms, even though they are civilians

are the revolutions of the Arab world and its neighbourhood back? Or perhaps more accurately - did they go anywhere to begin with? How are we to read these seemingly similar uprisings reminiscent of the glorious days and nights of Tahrir Square writ large?

Two counter-revolutionary forces have sought to derail the Arab revolutions: the governments of regional authoritarian powers (with the help of the United States and Israel) on one side and the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) - the offspring of their geopolitical machinations - on the other.

Since this new wave of protests began, various attempts have been made to explain them in the context of global or local trends.  Similar demonstrations have taken place around the world and been attributed to the austerity measures of incompetent governments. In Chile, Ecuador, Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, public anger with economic mismanagement has sent thousands of people on to the streets.

There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.

continued protests after the ouster of a dictator can put pressure on elites to follow through on commitments to democratize. However, seven months in, the Algerian regime has yet to budge, seemingly hoping for the protests to fizzle out and for non-protesters to grow tired of the demonstrations. Indeed, recent scholarship suggests that continued protests can be a double-edged sword, potentially driving non-protesters to grow frustrated not only with demonstrations but with democracy more generally.

we find that support for “a complete change of the political system” has actually grown over time, both among protesters and non-protesters. Among protesters, the percent who supported or strongly supported a complete change was 78 percent in April, and this has increased to 89 percent in October. Similarly, among non-protesters, support for a complete change was 64 percent in April but 74 percent in October. Nine months into the protests, there is even greater support for systemic change

From April to October, support for the protests has slightly fallen from 94 percent to 80 percent among protesters, and from 67 percent to 58 percent among non-protesters. Similarly, the percent that want the protests to continue has fallen from 93 percent to 71 percent among protesters, and from 76 percent to 58 percent among non-protesters

The authoritarian normalization that continues to mark relations between Turkey’s political and military echelons since the 2016 failed coup is now affecting the policymaking process in the country's defense industry. The industry is the new favorite of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, as the bruising financial crisis heavily hit his former favorite sector, construction.

Four major reasons are behind Erdogan's piqued interest in the defense industry: First, Erdogan's popular support drastically increased after Turkey’s Oct. 9 incursion into Syria, known as Operation Peace Spring. Second, the defense industry is a good tool for producing success stories to divert public attention at a time of economic crisis. Third, success in the defense realm offers political gains in foreign policy. And finally, it creates profitable export opportunities to several countries including Qatar, Pakistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and some African nations.

In December 2017, Erdogan issued a decree placing TSKGV under his auspices. Since then, however, Erdogan hasn’t quite managed to establish full control over the institution, which mainly remains under the influence of the retired generals.

Israel’s political system is currently ensnared in a dizzying spiral the likes of which it has never known. The unprecedented decision by Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit to indict an incumbent prime minister on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust has rattled Israeli politics, which was already suffering from deep polarization, and this is just the beginning. In a nationally televised response to Mandelblit’s announcement of the indictments on Nov. 21, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared that he is being subjected to an “attempted coup.”

Netanyahu, heavily influenced by his legal woes, will push Israel into a third election in less than a year to gin up public support at the ballot box in the hope that his supporters will at least acquit him in the court of public opinion.

Yisrael Beitenu leader Avigdor Liberman, whose party holds the deciding votes in the current political deadlock, has not only put him in a bind, but has also created an “alliance of the underprivileged”

Mahmoud al-Sisi, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi’s son and a senior official in the powerful General Intelligence Service (GIS), is being reassigned to a long-term position at Egypt’s diplomatic delegation in Moscow

perception within the president’s inner circle that Mahmoud al-Sisi has failed to properly handle a number of his responsibilities and that his increasingly visible influence in the upper decision-making levels of government is having a negative impact on his father’s image

suggestion that the president’s son be sidelined also came from senior government figures in the United Arab Emirates, a close and influential ally of Egypt, who view Mahmoud al-Sisi’s role as having become damaging to the president

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a bitter struggle to prevent his challenger from establishing a government with support from the Arab-led Joint List party, has again accused Arab party leaders of representing an existential threat to Israel. On Sunday night, Joint List Chairman Ayman Odeh responded by circulating a photo on social media of himself in pajamas, reading stories to his three doting kids. “At the end of a long day, I’ve got to put these existential threats to sleep!” he wrote, to viral delight.

Netanyahu’s frenzied anti-Arab diatribes are accelerating in pace and severity. In 2015 he warned that Arab citizens were voting “in droves.” Prior to the September election, his Facebook page stated that “Arab politicians want to destroy us all.” (Netanyahu said it was a campaign staffer’s mistake.) On Sunday, Netanyahu held an “emergency” meeting of Likud members (the emergency was not a rain of rockets but the possibility of a minority coalition backed by the Joint List). There he thundered that the rival Blue and White party was negotiating with the Arab MKs, who, he insisted, “support terror organizations and want to destroy the state.”

conflating Iran’s “existential threat” with Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel mimics the ideological rhetoric behind some of the worst ethnic violence in the world

teens who are trying to make sense of social issues aren’t finding progressive activists willing to pick them up. They’re finding the so-called alt-right. I can’t tell you how many youth we’ve seen asking questions like I asked being rejected by people identifying with progressive social movements, only to find camaraderie among hate groups. What’s most striking is how many people with extreme ideas are willing to spend time engaging with folks who are in the tornado.Spend time reading the comments below the YouTube videos of youth struggling to make sense of the world around them. You’ll quickly find comments by people who spend time in the manosphere or subscribe to white supremacist thinking. They are diving in and talking to these youth, offering a framework to make sense of the world, one rooted in deeply hateful ideas. These self-fashioned self-help actors are grooming people to see that their pain and confusion isn’t their fault, but the fault of feminists, immigrants, people of color. They’re helping them believe that the institutions they already distrust — the news media, Hollywood, government, school, even the church — are actually working to oppress them.

Deeply committed to democratic governance, George Washington believed that a representative government could only work if the public knew their representatives. As a result, our Constitution states that each member of the House should represent no more than 30,000 constituents. When we stopped adding additional representatives to the House in 1913 (frozen at 435), each member represented roughly 225,000 constituents. Today, the ratio of congresspeople to constituents is more than 700,000:1. Most people will never meet their representative, and few feel as though Washington truly represents their interests. The democracy that we have is representational only in ideal, not in practice.

Journalism can only function as the fourth estate when it serves as a tool to voice the concerns of the people and to inform those people of the issues that matter. Throughout the 20th century, communities of color challenged mainstream media’s limitations and highlighted that few newsrooms represented the diverse backgrounds of their audiences. As such, we saw the rise of ethnic media and a challenge to newsrooms to be smarter about their coverage. But let’s be real — even as news organizations articulate a commitment to the concerns of everyone, newsrooms have done a dreadful job of becoming more representative