Governance

Not surprisingly, the Indonesian presidential election to be held on July 8 looks differently in Jakarta than from abroad. Foreign observers, bolstered by optimistic polling data, see President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, or SBY as he is familiarly known, cruising to a first-round victory with a majority close to the 61 percent he garnered in 2004.

It is easy to be swept up by all of the images coming out of Iran and think that the days of dictatorship—in Iran and the rest of the world—are numbered. Overnight, normally innocuous social networking tools swiftly have turned political, and local events have found international audiences mere instants after they occur.

The decision of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) to lay down their arms and the May 19 death of their leader Velupillai Prabhakaran at the hands of the Sri Lankan army marked the end of 25 years of intermittent bloody conflict that had convulsed the island.

Technology creates new sources of power. Network technologies diffuse power. New networking technologies erode traditional means of political control and create new kinds of politics. The effect can be immediate—as when Falun Gong supporters used e-mail to organize simultaneous demonstrations across China.

Markets generally take a “Stop them before they kill again!” approach to Democrats and trade policy. This is true even though Smoot, Hawley, and Hoover were Republicans, and Ronald Reagan holds the record for dollar value of restrictions imposed on U.S.

This report is an assessment by the CSIS Americas Program of the Plan de Consolidación Integral de la Macarena (PCIM), a project that the government of Colombia is implementing in six municipalities of the department of Meta. First organized in August 2007, the PCIM is now a year-and-a-half old, although it was not fully implemented until late that year.