The Bulgarians arrested Agim Ceku last week! But then, after a couple of days, they let him go. Serbia is upset.
Who is Agim Ceku, and why should you care?
Well, Agim Ceku is a very important Kosovar Albanian. He was an officer in the Yugoslav army and then, after 1991, he was a [...]

So someone tried to blow up Yunus-Bek Yevkorov last week. Almost got him, too: they seem to have killed several members of his entourage, including his cousin, and Yevkorov himself is currently in a Moscow hospital with burns and a ruptured liver. He’s expected to live, though.
We wrote about Mr. Yevkorov a few [...]

Not Iran this time!
I’ve been in Senegal the last couple of weeks. And, you know? Senegal is (1) 90% Muslim, and (2) a vibrant democracy.
The opposition won the last couple of elections. The press is free — sometimes obnoxiously so. Human rights violations are relatively rare. (Nonexistent, really, [...]

If you’re a human being who speaks French, you’re more likely to be African than European. La Francophonie’s demographic center of gravity is now somewhere around Bamako, Mali.
If you’re a human being who is literate in French — say, at a high school graduate level — you’re probably European. But not [...]

One man’s opinion.

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My Iran null hypothesis is now
(1) Neither Ahmadinejad nor Khameini, nor their supporters, were expecting this degree of blowback. The size and intensity of the [...]

about Iran.
via Andrew Sullivan — who, for his work this past week, shall be forgiven much — comes Daniel Larison, fretting about regime collapse and separatist movements in Iran. Those strike me as deeply improbable. Iran is not a failed or even a particularly weak state; if the current incumbents are forced out [...]

Yesterday the Supreme Leader of Iran doubled down, declaring his support for President Ahmedinejad and telling the protestors it would be their own damn fault if anything happened. Today saw riots and more bloodshed.
Well: three days ago I said President Ahmedinejad would not lose. Today I’ll go a step further and add a [...]

We’ve seen a number of regimes fall because of popular protests: Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia, yadda yadda. We’ve also seen several that have not fallen: Burma, Armenia, Greece. Which one does Iran more resemble? Or, to put it another way, what are the common factors?
Here’s a first attempt at classification. Political scientists [...]

Via The Monkey Cage, an interesting article on the lessons hardline regimes may have learned from the Orange Revolution. Here are his four lessons:
1) If you are going to fix the results of an election, give yourself a big margin of victory. Otherwise, a little electoral fraud can credibly be argued to have swung the [...]

I’m in Senegal for a couple of weeks, on business.
Pretty much everything I wrote about French in Burundi in this post last year applies to French in Senegal. All educated Senegalese speak French; most speak it really well; they’ve also picked up a lot of distinctly Gallic tics of gesture and conversational patterning. [...]