AHS Comparative Government

Russian President Vladimir Putin remains broadly popular with the Russian public, largely as a result of his personal charisma and his assertive foreign policy. The Economist, however, wonders how long Putin can retain his extraordinary popularity: falling oil prices have resulted in "recession, falling real wages and rampant inflation" (44).

"Vladimir Unbound." The Economist 30 Jan. 2016: 44. The Economist Newspaper Ltd. Print.

In his first eight months in office, Nigerian President Muhammadu Buhari has cracked down on corruption. Officials who stole public funds during the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan have been arrested, auditors have begun to examine public agency accounts, and new financial control measures have been adopted in an attempt to prevent graft in the future. Buhari has also made some progress against Boko Haram, a violent radical Islamist group based in northern Nigeria.

Nonetheless, President Buhari faces serious challenges. Oil revenues account for "only 10% of [Nigeria's] GDP, but 70% of government revenue and almost all of Nigeria's foreign earnings" (39); the dramatic fall in the price of oil has resulted in slower economic growth and an incipient financial crisis in Nigeria. To prevent a serious recession, Buhari has increased infrastructure spending, even though government revenue has fallen by 30%; he plans to finance the increased spending by raising taxes, cutting fuel subsidies, reducing the amount of public funds lost to corruption and borrowing funds from abroad.

Buhari is also trying to prevent inflation by keeping Nigeria's currency, the naira, pegged to the dollar. The Economist warns that this strategy is unlikely to keep prices stable (the naira has fallen dramatically on the black market), but will hurt Nigerian industry. Allowing the value of the naira to fall, on the other hand, would make imports more expensive in Nigeria, thus giving Nigerian producers an advantage in the Nigerian market; at the same time, it would make Nigerian exports more competitive in foreign markets.

"Crude Tactics." The Economist 30 Jan. 2016: 39-40. The Economist Newspaper Ltd. Print.

In Mexico, 98% of murders are never solved. Indeed, Mexicans have so little faith in their criminal justice system that, according to some estimates, only 12% of all crimes are even reported to the police.

Frustrated by ineffective and corrupt policing, Mexicans have begun to take the law into their own hands: there were twice as many lynchings in Mexico in 2015 than there were in 2014. The results of such vigilantism are horrendous:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/24/world/americas/as-frustrations-with-mexicos-government-rise-so-do-lynchings.html?_r=0

Iran will hold elections in February for both the Majles and the Assembly of Religious Experts. Almost 12,000 Iranians filed ballot papers, seeking to run for one of the two bodies. However, the Guardian Council, which has the legal responsibility for vetting candidates for public office, has disqualified 7300 of the candidates. Reformist candidates were particularly likely to be disqualified; only 30 of the 3,000 reformist candidates were approved by the Guardian Council.

The Guardian Council's decisions were only preliminary; it will announce the final list of approved candidates for the Majles and for the Assembly of Religious Experts on February 4. The Guardian Council is expected to restore roughly 15% of the disqualified candidates to the ballot.

Nonetheless, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani took the unusual step of publicly calling on the Guardian Council to restore many of the reformist candidates to the ballot. Rouhani reasoned that the 7 to 10 million Iranians who support the reformists deserve representation in Iran's elected bodies:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-35370799

In 2006, two former KGB agents, Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun, poisoned Alexander Litvinenko in London. They are believed to have slipped a radioactive isotope, polonium-210, into Litvinenko's tea. Litvinenko, a former Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) agent who was highly critical of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had fled Russia for exile in Britain; he died a slow, agonizing death from radiation poisoning.

In 2015, Sir Robert Owen, a retired High Court judge, chaired an inquiry into the Litvinenko assassination at the request of the British government. The inquiry heard public testimony, as well as testimony behind closed doors from British intelligence officers. Last week, Sir Robert issued his report. The report concludes that there is a "strong probability" that Litvinenko was poisoned "under the direction" of the FSB. The report concludes, further, that Putin "probably approved" Litvinenko's murder in advance:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/21/alexander-litvinenko-was-probably-murdered-on-personal-orders-of-putin

The Russian government has dismissed Sir Robert's report as a fabrication, and as British propaganda.

Sicarios (hired assassins) have murdered almost one hundred Mexican mayors in the past decade. In a chilling article in yesterday's New York Times, Ioan Grillo explains why. Grillo reports that the arrest of most of the leaders of Mexico's drug cartels have left their enforcers -- the sicarios -- in charge of Mexico's gangs. The sicarios are more brutal and dangerous than the businessmen they have replaced. At the same time, organized crime in Mexico has expanded from drug trafficking to extortion, kidnapping, oil bunkering and illegal mining. Among the targets of gang extortion are Mexico's mayors; the sicarios now in charge threaten to kill mayors if they do not give local gangsters a share of the budgets under their control, or if they do not name police chiefs with ties to organized crime:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/why-cartels-are-killing-mexicos-mayors.html

On Saturday, January 16, the International Atomic Energy Agency certified that Iran had complied with its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action signed by Iran, the United States, China, Russia, Britain, France and Germany. Pursuant to the JCPOA, Iran eliminated almost all of its stockpile of enriched uranium and destroyed most of the centrifuges it used to enrich uranium.

As a result, the UN Security Council, the European Union and the United States suspended the economic sanctions they had imposed on Iran as a result of Iran's uranium enrichment program. (Nonetheless, some EU and US sanctions remained in effect on Iran). Iran will now receive as much as $100 billion in Iranian assets that were frozen in banks outside Iran as a result of the sanctions; most of these funds are payments for oil shipped from Iran to foreign customers prior to the imposition of sanctions.

Shortly after the lifting of most sanctions against Iran, the United States and Iran announced that Iran had freed four Iranian-Americans long held in prison in Iran. In exchange, the US freed seven Iranians held in US prisons for violating the international sanctions regime previously imposed on Iran.

On Sunday, January 17, the United States announced that it had imposed limited additional sanctions on Iran in response to a guided missile test conducted by Iran in October. (The missile tested by Iran would be capable of carrying a nuclear warhead, if Iran had such a weapon). The new sanctions target eleven Iranian institutions and individuals connected to Iran's missile program.

Joaquín “El Chapo” (Shorty) Guzmán, described by The Economist as Mexico's "most notorious drug-trafficker," has been recaptured. The head of the Sinaloa drug cartel is now incarcerated at Altiplano prison, the same prison from which he escaped in July 2015. Perhaps he can have his old room back -- the one with the mile-long tunnel that starts beneath the shower:

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21685730-government-escapes-major-embarrassment-mexicos-most-wanted-man-capturedagain

The Nigerian federal government is now transferring about half as much money to Nigeria's state governments as it did two years ago. This has resulted in cutbacks in state spending and, in some states, plans to impose new taxes:

http://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21685506-how-toxic-blend-identity-politics-and-cheap-oil-hurts-nigerias-states-house

On January 1, Gisela Mota was sworn in as the mayor of Temixco, a city of 100,000 in the state of Morelos. (Temixco is roughly 50 miles south of Mexico City). The following day, she was assassinated in her home by men with links to a local drug gang. Mota, a former Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) Deputy, supported Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto's mando único (unified command) policy, which allows state governments to take control of local police forces. Morelos Governor Graco Ramírez attributed Mota's murder to her support for the policy. On January 3, he announced that the government of Morelos would take over 15 local police departments in the state:

http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21685521-governing-dangerous-job-death-and-mayor

The Chinese government appears to be cracking down on dissent in several parts of the country.

In China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, 45.2% of the population is Uyghur, while 40.6% of the population is Han Chinese. The Uyghurs are a Central Asian ethnic group. They speak a Turkic language; most practice Sufi Islam (a branch of Sunni Islam). 

In recent decades, the Chinese government has resettled hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese in Xinjiang, in order to tie the region more closely to the rest of China. (Sixty years ago, less than 10% of the population of Xinjiang was Han Chinese). In many parts of Xinjiang, Han Chinese residents live in settlements separate from the towns and villages where the Uyghurs (and other residents of Central Asian ancestry) live.

Several Uyghur separatist groups have operated in Xinjiang in recent years; some have carried out acts of violence against Chinese officials and Chinese troops stationed in the region. Although most of these attacks have been carried out in the name of Uyghur independence, and not in the name of political Islam, the Chinese government has expressed concerned about what it calls growing Islamist terrorism in Xinjiang. The Chinese government has acted on these concerns by imposing significant restrictions on the practice of Islam in the region.

The restrictions imposed on the practice of Islam in Xinjiang, however, have increased Uyghur resentment of Chinese rule. Those restrictions may also be leading to religious radicalization, and therefore may be increasing the possibility of religiously-motivated terrorism in the region:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/03/world/asia/xinjiang-seethes-under-chinese-crackdown.html?ref=todayspaper&_r=0

Hong Kong was a British colony from the late 19th century to 1997. In 1984, the British and Chinese governments agreed that Britain would restore Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. As part of that agreement, the Chinese government agreed that Hong Kong would be governed separately from the rest of China, and that Hong Kong would enjoy a high level of political autonomy and freedom.

When Hong Kong formally became part of China in 1997, it promised Hong Kong's residents to respect their freedom of speech and the press. Since 1997, Hong Kong has, in fact, enjoyed more political autonomy than any other part of China. Hong Kong residents have enjoyed freedom of speech and the press, and have elected some of the members of the Hong Kong Legislative Council.

In the past two months, however, five men associated with a bookstore in Hong Kong that sells books critical of the Chinese government have gone missing. Pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong believe that the men are in police custody in mainland China. If this is true, then the Chinese government has violated the commitments it made, both to the British government and to the residents of Hong Kong, to respect Hong Kong's autonomy, and its traditions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35217218

A crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong would appear to run contrary to long-term Chinese geopolitical interests. The Chinese government hopes one day to persuade the people of Taiwan to recognize the government of the People's Republic of China in Beijing as their national government; the Chinese government has said that, if the Taiwanese do so, they will continue to enjoy the same economic and political rights that they now take for granted. If, however, such promises are not respected in Hong Kong, the residents of Taiwan are hardly likely to believe that they will be respected on Taiwan.