Daniel Brumberg is associate professor of government and director of Democracy and Governance Studies at Georgetown University, and a senior nonresident fellow at the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED).
Given the unaccountable authority of the supreme leader, the Islamic Republic should be classified as a sultanistic regime. In such regimes, democratic change is more likely to come from nonviolent…
Egyptians threw off the thirty-year dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak, but now find themselves under essentially the same military tutelage that they had hoped to escape.
Whether ethnic, sectarian, or some combination of the two, communalsim is one of the massive realities of Middle Eastern life and politics. It is usually seen as an obstacle to…