In Tunisia, a Day of Reckoning Awaits

By James Snell and Lydia Wilson

The past year has seen Tunisia — long heralded as the single success story of the Arab Spring — edge toward dictatorship. It is feared that the results of the looming referendum on July 25 will be the final nail in the coffin of the country’s democracy, a fragile system that has nevertheless endured in the 11-plus years since Mohamed Bouazizi, a market trader, set himself on fire and sparked protests that spread across the region.

Read the rest of this essay by Lydia Wilson and an extended interview with Rached Ghannouchi at New Lines Magazine.

The Dangers of Politics

From across the Atlantic, it seems that American presidents are gunned down, or at the very least shot at in anger, with steady regularity. None have been hit in my lifetime, but enough have been attacked in living memory for it to be a minor cliché of the office. By contrast, only one British prime minister has been assassinated — and it was over 200 years ago; and his name, Spencer Perceval, is remembered almost solely in light of that fact.