March 12, 2010

Iraq returning to post-election tensions?

Iraq's Independent Higher Election Commission (IHEC) has taken much longer than expected to publish the results of the general election conducted five days ago, on Sunday. Their English-language website is...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:52 AM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

March 10, 2010

That 'democratic justification' for invading Iraq, Part LXIII

It's Tom Friedman, at it once again in today's NYT! Here we are now, almost exactly fourteen Friedman Units (F.U.'s) after George W. Bush's (heavily Friedman-supported) invasion of Iraq, and...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:35 AM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

September 09, 2009

When election results are disputed: Afghanistan, etc

When election results are strongly disputed from within the community they were held in, this represents--obviously-- a deep crisis of power and legitimacy within that community. That's the case in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 12:17 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

August 21, 2009

Does Afghanistan's election matter? How, exactly?

The only thing that really matters about the presidential election held in Afghanistan yesterday was whether it will generate a nationwide government that has enough political credibility with the country's...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:51 PM | Fulltext link (19 comments)

December 22, 2008

Afghanistan: "What would Thomas Jefferson do?"

Vampire06 of 'Afghanistan Shrugged' had an informative, well-written post yesterday about the challenges of trying-- as the head of a US Army 'Embedded Training Team'-- to put into place the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:57 AM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

July 02, 2008

Some quick thoughts about democracy

Remember back in 2005, how George Bush and his acolytes provided us with a series of "purple finger moments", using the record of the three successive nationwide polls that the...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:01 AM | Fulltext link (54 comments)

March 10, 2008

Support democratic principles in Egypt!

Reuters is reporting from Cairo that Egypt's biggest opposition group, the Muslim Brotherhood says that only 50 or 60 of the thousands of its members who have tried to register...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:19 PM | Fulltext link (13 comments)

September 28, 2007

The fate of the Bushites' "demagogratization" project in the Middle East

I went to a lunch-time discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, titled "Recovering from Arab Spring Fever". That's a reference to the fad for "democratizing" the Middle East...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:52 PM | Fulltext link (7 comments)

July 15, 2007

Sam Waterston: Commencent Address for America

Actor Sam Waterston, known to the nation as Jack McCoy on the long running TV series Law & Order, recently delivered one of the best commencement speeches anywhere -- at...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 01:59 PM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

November 02, 2006

Scary Politics: "What happens if we lose?"

We survived Halloween. No October Surprises; No Gulf of Tonkin incidents manufactured to start another war in the Persian Gulf - yet. Meanwhile, the political air here in America has...
Posted by Scott Harrop at 03:14 PM | Fulltext link (11 comments)

October 24, 2006

Elections and post-conflict tasks: Iraq and elsewhere

Juan Cole had a quick link to this piece by Robert H. Reid in yesterday's Guardian. Reid argued there that, The search for an end to Iraq's violence is being...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:30 AM | Fulltext link (9 comments)

August 23, 2006

Birth pangs or an abortion, Condi?

Writing as someone who has delivered, and raised, three healthy children (thank G-d), and as someone who knows the difference between "birth pangs" and an abortion, I feel I need...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:09 PM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

March 02, 2006

Kaplan making sense?!

I don't think I've ever agreed with much at all of what Robert Kaplan-- just one of a long string of western male writers who trail around the world imagining...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:36 PM | Fulltext link (28 comments)

February 15, 2006

How to deal with an uncomfortable vote

(1) You could not hold it. (2) You could hold it, but make the conditions for campaigning and voting very unfair. (Egypt 2006, Florida 2000.) (3) You could hold it...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:00 PM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

October 01, 2005

Elections, Somaliland

There's a Filipina woman called Yvette Lopez who is one of my heroes. She has been working for around two years now for a Catholic-based international development organization-- deployed in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:42 PM | Fulltext link (4 comments)

September 19, 2005

Elections: Germany, Afghanistan

Interesting to be here in Europe at a time of such political uncertainty in Germany. Also, when are the results of the Afghanistan elections due?...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:27 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

August 15, 2005

Islams and democracy

James Rupert, the Islamabad correspondent of New York Newsday, has recently been making the interesting argument that westerners who want to see the spread of democracy in the Muslim-peopled parts...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:10 PM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

June 09, 2005

CSM column on democratization

Here's the column I have in the CSM today. The lede is: Should Americans and their leaders be pushing for greater democratization in the Middle East even if this process...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:45 PM | Fulltext link (3 comments)

April 17, 2005

Selling 'democracy' in Iraq

Faiza of "A family in Baghdad" has her most recent post now up on her blog in English. Go read it. It's about her experience at some kind of "democracy...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 02:40 PM | Fulltext link (6 comments)

January 19, 2005

Politics in Iraq and Palestine/Israel

Things are really starting to heat up in the election campaign in Iraq, while in Palestine and Israel there's a lot of complex "pre-negotiation" politics going on on both sides...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:24 AM | Fulltext link (2 comments)

January 13, 2005

CSM column on democratization

Here is the column I have in today's Christian Science Monitor. It's titled (not by me) "Democracy-- after the vote" and tries to make the point that a commitment to...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 11:21 AM | Fulltext link (17 comments)

January 10, 2005

Palestinian elections: pix from Ramallah Friends School

The Quakers have had two schools in Ramallah since the 1870s or so. There used to be one for the boys and one for the girls. But now one is...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 05:08 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)

January 06, 2005

Voting under the gun, revisited

Commenter "b" posted the following thought-provoking comment onto Tuesday's post here about the situation of holding elections "under the gun" of an occupying army: One point about Palestinian elections this...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 03:38 PM | Fulltext link (12 comments)

December 24, 2004

Palestinian municipal elections

AP's Ali Daraghmeh is reporting that Hamas did pretty well in the small-scale municipal elections held in the occupied Palestinian territories yesterday. Indeed, Hamas did better than I'd expected in...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 10:20 AM | Fulltext link (8 comments)

December 23, 2004

A gift to JWN readers from Professor Sachedina

Abdulaziz Sachedina is a very experienced scholar of and in the tradition of (Shii) Muslim thought who's the Francis Ball Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia. He's...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 09:15 AM | Fulltext link (5 comments)

November 26, 2004

Post-conflict election: Mozambique

Mozambique will on Dec 1-2 be holding the third of the democratic national elections it has held since the termination of its civil war in 1992. If the election proceeds...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 07:19 AM | Fulltext link (22 comments)

Post-conflict election risks

Can hasty, ill-planned elections actually impede democratization in post-conflict societies? You bet they can. "It is one of the perverse realities of postconflict elections that this lynchpin of the democratic...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 06:38 AM | Fulltext link (14 comments)

February 17, 2003

Iraq Democrats Disappointed

Back last summer, I got into a heartfelt exchange with a friend of mine who's an Iraqi democrat. His name is Siyamend Othman. He's a wise and good person, an...
Posted by Helena Cobban at 08:48 PM | Fulltext link (0 comments)