By Dr. James M. Dorsey | The sigh of relief in a swath of land stretching from China to Africa’s Atlantic coast was audible when Yevgeny Prigozhin, a Russian oligarch who heads the Wagner Group, a state-funded private military company, called off his mutiny against President Vladimir Putin’s military and security establishment. So were the concerns and unanswered questions the …
● The debate about whether a state should be religious or secular doesn’t always affect how a society treats religious minorities. By Peter Jacob | A significant number of states have changed their relationship with religion recently, sparking debate about official government policies towards religious minorities. Bangladesh and Nepal, for example, moved to a secular state model, while Maldives, Tunisia …
By Dr. James M. Dorsey Religious conservatives and nationalists in the Muslim world and beyond have the wind in their sails. So do Arab autocrats, even if they increasingly cloak themselves in nationalism rather than religious conservatism. Last week’s first election round in Turkey saw conservatives and ultra-nationalists win control of parliament. At the same time, Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears …
Dr. James M. Dorsey | US President Joe Biden positions the Ukraine war as a battle between autocracy and democracy. That reduces what is at stake in the war. The stakes constitute a fundamental building block of a new 21st-century world order: the nature of the state. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine represents the sharp end of the rise of a …
By James M. Dorsey Qatar 2022 put the myth of a separation of sports and politics to bed. Like in Qatar, human, worker, and LGBT rights are likely to be left, right, and centre as other Gulf and North African states move centre stage as hosts of and bidders for some of the world’s foremost mega-sporting events, the 2030 World …
By James M. Dorsey | Qatar has begun to cleanse its schoolbooks of supremacist, racist or derogatory references as well as celebrations of violent jihad and martyrdom, according to a recently released study. The revision of textbooks in the final year leading up to Qatar’s hosting of the 2022 World Cup is designed to keep the Gulf state in the …
By James M. Dorsey An Indonesian promise to work with the United Arab Emirates to promote ‘moderate’ Islam raises questions of what constitutes moderation and how it can best be achieved. The pledge, made by Indonesian President Joko Widodo during a three-day visit to the UAE some time ago to solicit Emirati investment in the world’s most populous Muslim-majority state, …
By James M. Dorsey Gulf states are in a pickle. They fear that the emerging parameters of a reconfigured US commitment to security in the Middle East threaten to upend a more-than-a-century-old pillar of regional security and leave them with no good alternatives. The shaky pillar is the Gulf monarchies’ reliance on a powerful external ally that, in the words …
By James M. Dorsey A paradigm shift in jihadist thinking suggests that the US invasion of Afghanistan may prove to have achieved more than many counterterrorism experts would want policymakers and military strategists to believe. Similarly, the paradigm shift also hints at the possibility that the presence in a Taliban-governed Afghanistan of various militant Islamist and jihadist groups could turn …
