Sergei Magnitsky was a thirty-seven year old Russian lawyer and auditor who worked for Hermitage Capital Management, a firm founded in 1996 by Bill Browder, the grandson of the famous leader of the American Communist Party, Earl Browder (1891-1973). Hermitage made tens of millions of dollars in the rush to buy up and sell state assets in the chaotic economic circumstances of Boris Yeltsin’s Russia. Browder’s efforts in the early 2000s to use the emerging Russian legal system to protect his investments and encourage large companies to operate transparently led him to cross swords with the financial and business elite of Putin’s Russia.

Some of the most moving responses I received after publishing my book Exile and Identity: Polish Women in the Soviet Union during World War II, which focuses on civilian deportees from Eastern Poland to the USSR in 1939-41, came from daughters of women who had been deported. One such daughter, who was born in California after her mother's long journey from a Soviet settlement, through the Middle East, and ending in the US, thanked me for writing the book. "I never understood what was wrong with my mother, why she was so different," she said, "until I read your book." In conversation, she spoke of the great chasm she felt between herself and her mother, whose traumatic past she found a heavy yet inscrutable presence in her home. Her words came to mind as soon as I opened Donna Solecka Urbikas' memoir, My Sister's Mother: A Memoir of War, Exile and Stalin's Siberia. Urbikas is the daughter and sister of Polish exiles. Her father, Wawrzyniec Solecki, was captured and interned by the Soviets as a reserve army officer, while her mother, Janina, and sister Mira (age five at the time) were forcibly deported to the Urals region of Russia in 1940.

With Yugoslavia’s successor states simmeringwith conflict and discontent,problems of security,governance, and identity could boil over.

Not that long ago, debates over politics were anchored in a clear opposition between universalism and relativism. Proponents of an inclusive structure of, at least aspirationally, all states—the new world order—envisioned an unchallenged entrenchment of democratic capitalism everywhere. Where dictatorships endured, as in North Korea, they were treated as bizarre outliers, exceptions that proved the rule of the progress of mankind toward Kant’s perpetual peace. Universalist values held sway; ultimately all rights were to become human rights, due to all humans solely on the basis of their humanity, implying that rights pursuant to national citizenship, to membership in any particular national community, would dwindle in significance: no borders, no sovereignty, no traditions. However this conceptual expression of globalization faced sophisticated critics, variously postmodern, which treated that universalism with disdain and suspicion, insinuating to it an imperial agenda and offering an alternative program of multiplicity, diversity, and multipolarity

In the month of April, I found myself saying “I agree with Trump” more than anytime ever. On China, Russia, NATO and Syria, President Trump signaled radical changes in policy, nearly the complete opposite of what he said as a candidate. All were changes for the good — that is, new policy positions that advance American security, prosperity and values. The lingering question is whether these recent statements signal a fundamental change in Trump’s thinking about foreign policy or rather short-term reversals that could be reversed again. Is he learning or ad-libbing? It’s too early to tell.

After the vote results came in last November, many Russians close to the Kremlin celebrated. “Our Trump” — or #TrumpNash, as they tweeted — had been elected president of the United States... Of course, many factors combined to produce Trump’s victory, but Putin’s intervention most certainly played a contributing role.

From the former secretary of state and bestselling author -- a sweeping look at the global struggle for democracy and why America must continue to support the cause of human freedom.

From the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union to the ongoing struggle for human rights in the Middle East, Condoleezza Rice has served on the front lines of history. As a child, she was an eyewitness to a third awakening of freedom, when her hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, became the epicenter of the civil rights movement for black Americans.

In this book, Rice explains what these epochal events teach us about democracy. At a time when people around the world are wondering whether democracy is in decline, Rice shares insights from her experiences as a policymaker, scholar, and citizen, in order to put democracy's challenges into perspective.

When the United States was founded, it was the only attempt at self-government in the world. Today more than half of all countries qualify as democracies, and in the long run that number will continue to grow. Yet nothing worthwhile ever comes easily. Using America's long struggle as a template, Rice draws lessons for democracy around the world -- from Russia, Poland, and Ukraine, to Kenya, Colombia, and the Middle East. She finds that no transitions to democracy are the same because every country starts in a different place. Pathways diverge and sometimes circle backward. Time frames for success vary dramatically, and countries often suffer false starts before getting it right. But, Rice argues, that does not mean they should not try. While the ideal conditions for democracy are well known in academia, they never exist in the real world. The question is not how to create perfect circumstances but how to move forward under difficult ones.

These same insights apply in overcoming the challenges faced by governments today. The pursuit of democracy is a continuing struggle shared by people around the world, whether they are opposing authoritarian regimes, establishing new democratic institutions, or reforming mature democracies to better live up to their ideals. The work of securing it is never finished.

The article explores the ways in which the sixteenth-century Illuminated Chronicle (Litsevoi letopisnyi svod) demonstrates the ideology of state legitimacy through its illustrations. Analyzing images of judicial punishment, it explores how artists worked within iconographic conventions to demonstrate a consistent image of legitimate, and illegitimate, uses of coercive power, using such devices as gesture, pose, regalia, and composition. As one of the few sources of somewhat secular art in Muscovy, these images provide a valuable source for political ideology.