Publications

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Datesort descending Title
Feb 01 2009
Turkey
This was a critical election year for Turkey. The parliamentary elections were held well before their planned date, due to the political crisis resulting from the failure to elect a new President a few months earlier.1 The relative calm in which the elections took place was shattered when one candidate, the independent Tuncay Seyranlioglu, was shot to death while riding in his car in a district of Istanbul.
 
 
Jul 01 2009
Iran

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became President of Iran in May 2005 with the support of the fundamentalists led by the Ayatollah Taqi Mesbah and the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s conservatives, defeating Hashemi Rafsanjani’s pragmatists and the reformists of Mohamed Khatami.

Jul 12 2009
Iran

Iran’s tenth presidential election coincided with the 30th anniversary of the establishment of the Islamic Republic and with an incipient crisis in the political leadership resulting from clashes between the reformist and conservative sectors, but also between factions among the conservatives, including both President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as well as Hashemi Rafsanjani -the Chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council and the Assembly of Experts-, the Speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani, and other important figures in the Iranian political establi

Jul 15 2009
Turkey
Las elecciones locales del 29 de marzo de 2009 han tenido lugar prácticamente dos años después de las elecciones generales de julio de 2007. En julio de 2008 el partido en el Gobierno, Partido de Justicia y Desarrollo (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) se enfrentó a un proceso judicial de ilegalización acusado de estar socavando los principios laicos de la República.
Jun 24 2011
Qatar

The elections of the members of Qatar's Central Municipal Council (CMC) that took place on 10 May, are the fourth such to be held since the council was first elected in 1999. The CMC is, furthermore, the only Qatari institution whose members are elected by Qatari citizens.

Jul 26 2011
Bahrain

Bahrain’s third parliamentary elections under King Hamad took place in an atmosphere of strong political tension. The election campaign period was preceded by a wave of arrests of more than 200 mostly-Shi‘i individuals accused of inciting or involvement in street violence. It especially targeted the leaders and members of unlicensed political associations, Haq and al-Wafa', which had called for a boycott of the elections, accusing them of being involved in a “terror network” and plotting to overthrow the government by instigating unrest.

Jul 26 2011
Turkey

Four major political parties competed in the Turkish legislative elections of June 2011: the governing Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP), the Republican People's Party (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, CHP), the Nationalist Movement Party (Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi, MHP) and the Peace and Democracy Party (Barış ve Demokrasi Partisi, BDP).

Nov 10 2011
Bahrain

Bahrain’s 2011 parliamentary by-elections were held following the resignation in February of 18 MPs from the main opposition association, al-Wefaq, who had been elected in October 2010 (see report on Bahrain’s 2010 parliamentary elections). This decision was taken in reaction to the government’s violence against protesters who gathered at the Pearl Roundabout in Manama to demand a new Constitution with an elected Prime Minister and full legislative powers for the Council of Representatives.

Nov 24 2011
Morocco

2011 will no doubt go down in history as the year when the Arab peoples rose up against the dictatorships and autocracies that had, post-independence, become the exclusive model of governance in this part of the world. The demands for freedom and democracy, denominated the Arab Spring, had a domino effect and soon called into question the myth of Moroccan exceptionality.

Nov 27 2011
Tunisia

The surprising events that began on 17 December with the immolation of a young Mohammed Bouazizi in the city of Sidi Bouzid would unleash a national catharsis of unprecedented consequences with a far-reaching impact. The incident, the result of an individual humiliation, transformed itself into a collective realisation among broad swathes of society that their situation was indignant and intolerable. In Sfax, then in Tunis and little by little across the whole country, these groups rose up, rousing a protest against the regime that was both decentralised and unstoppable.

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