Charles Recknagel is standards editor for RFE/RL.
Fear is rising in Afghanistan's southern city of Kandahar, where residents know NATO is planning an offensive to evict the Taliban.
The Iranian authorities have suspended two prominent opposition factions in a move that could dramatically alter the balance of power in the country.
Afghan President Hamid Karzai has steadily ratcheted up his criticism of the international community in recent days. The remarks have received much attention in foreign capitals, but how are they seen in Kabul?
Iraq's Turkoman community is feeling new strength after last month's national parliamentary elections, as it could play a decisive role in the forming of a new government.
Attacks on the former Iranian president and his family are the latest measure of how deeply Iran's establishment has split over the Green Movement.
The official results from Iraq's parliamentary elections show former Prime Minister Iyad Allawi's Iraqiya bloc won two more seats than current Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's State of Law bloc. The neck-in-neck results suggest that a lengthy effort to form a new government is about to begin, with high-stakes deal-making that could severely test the country's newfound stability.
The results of Iraq's parliamentary elections could complicate Kurdish hopes of incorporating oil-rich area around the northern city of Kirkuk into their autonomous region.
This weekend's vote will say a lot about Iraq's stability just months before a planned U.S. troop drawdown.
As Iraqis prepare to go to the polls on March 7, there is much uncertainty over whether the election will raise or lower sectarian tensions. That uncertainty is due, in large part, to the efforts of one man -- the highly controversial Ahmad Chalabi.
Just two months ago, climate change dominated the news as the Copenhagen summit sought a new strategy against global warming. But after the summit's mixed results, the "Climategate" controversy, and the surprise resignation of the chief UN negotiator, the issue is mired in uncertainty.
The showdown between the Islamist-rooted ruling party and Turkey's old secularist order has dramatically escalated with the detention of over 50 current and former military commanders.
What keeps Iran's Green Movement alive, despite being muscled off the streets? One big factor is anger over President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's peculiar vision of economics.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair told a government panel investigating how Britain became involved in the Iraq war today he made no "covert" deal with former U.S. President George W. Bush to invade Iraq in 2003.
China has overtaken Russia in the number of scientific research papers it publishes. That is the finding of a recent study that looked at what percent of the world’s scientific research papers are published by which countries.
The U.S. administration has sharply criticized Beijing’s policy of censoring access to the Internet. But is the Internet really such an effective democracy-building tool that it needs to be defended by U.S. foreign policy?
Iran is set to phase out the decades-long use of state subsidies to keep the costs of staple goods artificially low. This is intended to save the government billions of dollars annually, but it could also spark higher inflation, and risks adding economic discontent to Iran's political unrest.
Decades of disruptions have hindered the middle class across much of Eurasia. But with time and the development of commerce, the middle class should get stronger. But will it seek greater democracy?
There are many people from the Balkans to Russia to Afghanistan who define themselves as middle class, either by their income level or their educational level. But as a social force for change in their societies, this emerging middle class remains noticeably weak.
From the Balkans to Russia to Afghanistan, the middle class and the people who might have become a middle class have trouble making ends meet and little voice in how their countries are governed. Why is the middle class in this region so weak, and what is needed to strengthen it?
Drug smuggling is big business in northern Afghanistan, where one-fifth of the country's illegal exports goes across the Afghan-Tajik border. The business enriches the drug lords. But it terrifies ordinary villagers, who often become pawns in the game.
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