By Courtney Freer, London School of Economics
Cross-ideological movements uniting Islamist and secular groups have increasingly focused on sweeping political reforms instead of social policies and ideology in post-Arab Spring Kuwait, writes the author.
This brief is the second of four resulting from a May 2018 workshop held in Kuwait by the Baker Institute in partnership with the Alsalam Center for Strategic and Developmental Studies. This work is part of a two-year project funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York on “Building Pluralistic and Inclusive States Post-Arab Spring.”
The Baker Institute's Presidential Elections Program held its inaugural conference, “Social Media, Changing Demographics and Implications of the 2016 Presidential Election,” in March 2018. This report summarizes the presentations and discussions of the more than two dozen individuals who participated in the conference’s four thematic panels as well as a lunch conversation featuring veteran political consultants David Axelrod and Karl Rove, who served as the conference's honorary directors.
By Daniel L. Tavana, Princeton University
The evolution of Kuwaiti opposition groups following changes to Kuwait's electoral law fundamentally altered the dynamics of electoral contests after the Arab Spring, the author writes.
Turkey's recent elections brought an unexpectedly strong win for President Recep Erdogan. Even so, opposition parties have a rare opportunity to influence policymaking, writes Middle East Fellow A.Kadir Yildirim in the Baker Institute Blog: https://bit.ly/2txuhMm
As the competition between the U.S. and China intensifies, energy fellow Gabriel Collins calls for U.S. leadership in a technology race that will determine global influence for decades to come.
In a new survey, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Episcopal Health Foundation sought to gauge Texans’ views on health policy priorities at both the state and national level. Overall, the survey finds that health care is a priority for Texans, with over half saying the state legislature should increase spending on health care programs, while roughly two-thirds of Texans say the state should expand its Medicaid program.
The PJD's pragmatic politics — intended to maintain the king’s support and appeal to heterogeneous constituencies — failed to protect the party from fragmentation and moves to weaken it.
The authors seek to spark a deeper conversation on the merits of geoeconomics — i.e., using economic instruments to produce beneficial geopolitical results — as a potential source of new and scalable policy options for the US, as well as the EU and its individual member states, to bolster gas supply and national security across Europe.
