Yes, Erdogan’s rule might actually end this weekend

Can elections remove an autocrat like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan from power? If you pose this question to Turkey watchers in Western capitals to get their take on the country’s upcoming election, you will get a resounding “no” from a significant number of them. Some will say Erdogan is still very popular—or at least adept at mobilizing his followers. Others will argue that elections do not matter in the entrenched autocracy he has built; one way or another, he will find a way to stay in power. Take the Western conventional wisdom about this Sunday’s election with a grain of salt, and here’s why.

Turkey’s 2023 Elections: Perspectives on a Critical Vote

It is a cliché for politicians to claim that an upcoming election is the most critical vote in the history of the country. In Turkey’s case, however, the presidential and parliamentary elections on May 14 are indeed the most consequential ever. The prospects for Turkey’s democratic future are at stake. If President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan wins another term, Turkey will degenerate further into authoritarianism in which elections will not matter. If the opposition wins, however, Turkey’s democracy will have a shot at consolidating. While there is much optimism among opposition supporters that change through the ballot box is within reach, anxiety and fear over election security are not in short supply either.

Sudan’s Two Truths

Amidst a flurry of international voices working to mediate the crisis in Sudan, the United States must not allow Sudanese civil society to be drowned out.

As rival security forces continue vying for power in Sudan by terrorizing its population, the prospects for an end to the crisis seem to grow more distant by the day. The “pre-negotiation talks” in Saudi Arabia hold only a tenuous promise of the most minimal steps toward easing the suffering. Most indicators point toward continued fighting, and the stream of bad news and failed ceasefires can make it seem as though an even deeper crisis is inevitable. But there are two important truths about Sudan that analysts and policymakers should keep front and center in the weeks ahead to point the way forward.

Why Is Pakistan Moving Towards A Failed State? Drastic Structural Reforms Are Required – OpEd

During the Second World War, the allied powers of the US, former Soviet Union, Great Britain, Germany, and France, being eminent winners in the war, laid the foundation of the United Nations and made international arrangements at the end of colonialism. Consequently, post-colonial nations emerged, and geographical boundaries were drawn for political and economic reasons to protect their interests in a future global order. Pakistan is one of those nation-states in post-colonial nationhood.

The Privatization of War, American-Style

The way mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin and his private army have been waging a significant part of Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine has been well covered in the American media, not least of all because his firm, the Wagner Group, draws most of its men from Russia’s prison system. Wagner offers “freedom” from Putin’s labor camps only to send those released convicts to the front lines of the conflict, often on brutal suicide missions.

Local Elections In Albania: Choice Between Drug Cartels And/Or Parliamentary Republic? – Analysis

In the Republic of Albania the next local elections are scheduled to take place on 14 May 2023. The last local elections, which were held on 30 June 2019, were boycotted by the opposition, while the turnout at the elections was only 21.6%. As a result, all positions in local self-governance authorities were occupied by the candidates of the Socialist Party (PS) headed by Edi Rama. The last local elections in Albania were conducted in an atmosphere of tensions, after the Albanian opposition had withdrawn from the work of the Parliament and organized political activities on the streets of Tirana at which it requested the resignation of Prime Minister Rama, establishment of an interim government and holding of general elections.

Documenting Detention: Part 1 – Photographing the US Detention System. A Conversation with Greg Constantine

The United States operates the world’s largest immigration detention system. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains migrants and asylum seekers in some 200 facilities, including privately operated detention facilities, local jails, juvenile detention centres, field offices, and “family residential centres.” On any given day, it can have upwards of 30,000 non-citizens in detention, which includes the tens of thousands of people apprehended every month on the U.S.-Mexico border by a separate enforcement agency, Customs and Border Protection. The costs of ICE’s detention operations are astronomical: The FY2023 detention budget was 2.9 billion USD.

The Multipolar Moment

In his article, “The Unipolar Moment”1, which was based on a series of lectures delivered in Washington, D.C. in September 1990, Charles Krauthammer wrote that a new world order was emerging in which the United States would be the only superpower. In the second paragraph of the article, Krauthammer introduced three main theses being discussed in the US political science community at the time: (1) the rise of multipolarity (interestingly enough, he suggests a “diminished Soviet Union/Russia” as one future pole, thus anticipating the collapse of the Soviet Union), (2) weakened consensus on foreign policy within the US, and (3) a diminishing of the threat of war in the post-Soviet era. Krauthammer promptly dismissed these arguments as erroneous, and instead spoke of the coming triumph of a unipolar world under the undisputed dominance of the US and its Western allies. Krauthammer did, however, immediately make one reservation: “No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era.”

21st-Century Geopolitics Of The Multipolar World Order

The world is presently in the midst of an epochal transition from unipolarity to multipolarity that is expected to characterize the foreseeable decades of the 21st century, if not its entirety. There are multiple dimensions to this paradigm-shifting process, which can leave observers completely overwhelmed when trying to make sense of it all, and most analysts tend to focus just on one or a couple factors while leaving out the rest of the bigger picture. This isn’t through any deliberate fault of their own, but rather due to their expert specialization in certain fields and the attendant time commitments that this typically entails, both of which largely hold them back from researching other related trends and grasping a comprehensive sense of everything else that’s happening.