Week: Partner Insights

The Foundation for the Defense of Democracy released an unprecedented survey yesterday of the Saudi social media sphere—a vast space on Twitter, Facebook, and a host of blogs, message boards, and mobile applications. Their findings offer a striking picture of a country that is, in the lead author Jonathan Schanzer’s words, usually “very much a black box” to the outside world. The portrait that emerges is that of a vastly conservative and controlled country, but one where new voices—ranging from women to liberals to religious extremists—are beginning to find a voice online.

The study, “Facebook Fatwa,” was originally commissioned to coincide with the 10-year anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, an event that inspired a radical shift in Saudi Arabia’s official response to extremist rhetoric, including online. The authors were interested in how plentiful and widespread such inciting language is in Saudi social media today, following a decade of state attempts to curtail it with harsh laws governing freedom of expression and extensive programs to reform would-be jihadists.

Ever since the so-called Rose Revolution of 2003, the Georgain administration has been heralded as the leading reformer in the region. Presiding over a state of constant change, it has managed to convince large parts of both domestic opinion and the international community that it alone is the guarantor of modernisation and development.

Clearly, the unprecedented increase in international financial assistance has allowed Georgia’s administration to launch large-scale projects and develop the country’s institutions and infrastructure. But have modernising reforms masked the fact that the government has ridden roughshod over democratic values? Over the years, I argue, the answer to this question has been a fairly unambiguous ‘Yes’.

Two unprecedented visits by Russian senior state officials have been made over the past few weeks in Tiraspol. On 12 April, Transnistria was visited by Defence Minister Anatoliy Serdyukov, and on 16–17 April by the deputy prime minister and special presidential envoy, Dmitry Rogozin.

In turn, on 18 April in Vienna, in the framework of the international negotiating format for the Transnstrian conflict, two documents were signed, which defined the principles and the agenda for substantive negotiations (the 5+2 format includes Chisinau and Tiraspol as parties to the conflict, Russia, Ukraine and the OSCE as the mediators and – since 2005 – the European Union and the United States as observers).

In addition to pop songs and glitzy costumes, the Eurovision song contest is notorious for how neighboring countries usually vote for each other rather than the best performer. But when this year’s contest takes place in Baku on May 26, don’t expect Azerbaijan to give any votes to its neighbor Armenia. Indeed, there will be no points for Armenia; they have pulled out of the event, citing animosity from Azeri authorities including President Ilham Aliyev, who said in February, “Our main enemies are Armenians of the world, and the hypocritical and corrupt politicians under their control.”

What could have been a feel-good confidence-building measure has turned into another example of how the unresolved status of Nagorno-Karabakh continues to poison relations between Armenia and Azerbaijan more than twenty years after the two countries went to war over this mountainous region.