Research Library

Seventy years after Mexican women gained the right to vote, two women are running for the presidency in 2024. Concerted legislative reform has built on women’s suffrage — aiming to achieve equal representation for women — but there is more work to be done.

Women in Egypt achieved a historic increase in their legislative representation in 2015, securing 14.9 percent of seats in parliament. In this brief, Cairo University professor Mazen Hassan analyzes transcripts of parliamentary sessions to determine whether this increase in female parliamentarians had a noticeable impact on Egypt’s legislative agenda.

The current leaders of Egypt and Saudi Arabia are trying to assert much more political control over their respective country's religious institutions. The lesson both regimes seem to have taken away from the Arab upheavals is not the necessity of pluralism, but instead the need for more regimentation, hierarchy, control, and exclusion.

Morocco's Justice and Development Party attempts to preserve its leading political position by presenting itself as an alternative to a system that, according to the PJD, is corrupt and morally bankrupt.

President Trump has promised to work with the Russians and the Syrians to defeat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). The odd man out in this equation will likely be the Syrian Kurds, a reliable ally against the jihadists but one whose usefulness is reaching its limits.