Democracy Lab Weekly Brief, June 22, 2015

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Golnaz Esfandiari profiles a brave Iranian lawyer whose one-woman protest against the regime is drawing support from unlikely quarters.

Tik Root and Katherine Sullivan ask whether, after two terms as Rwanda’s President, Paul Kagame is ready to step down — and whether his countrymen want him to.

Wai Moe warns that Burma’s press — unmuzzled since the onset of democratic reforms — is once again facing increased pressure to toe the government line.

Koert Debeuf and Ayman Abdelmeguid argue that the young generation that failed to transform Egypt politically in 2011 is now changing Egyptian society.

Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez explains why a new oil field discovered near Venezuela isn’t quite the miracle President Maduro has been dreaming of.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

A Washington Post editorial assails Egyptian President al-Sissi’s claims that only his forceful (and repressive) rule can protect his country from terrorism. The Egyptian embassy has responded with a forceful defense of the current administration’s record.

Jayson Casper, writing for the Atlantic Council’s EgyptSource blog, highlights the problems of using customary reconciliation — rather than formal legal procedures — to solve conflicts in Egypt’s sectarian environment.

Hervé Lemahieu of the International Institute for Strategic Studies argues that Beijing’s acceptance of Burmese opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi demonstrates China’s flexibility in dealing with its rapidly changing neighbor. (For an alternative take, read Dhruva Jaishankar’s recent FP dispatch from Rangoon, where he makes the case that her visit to Beijing underscores China’s desperation at losing influence in Burma.)

In the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch bemoans African rulers’ all-too-frequent refusals to lawfully give up power — and wonders whether Rwanda’s President Kagame will decide to buck the trend.

In the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Marc Lynch explains that recently leaked Saudi documents are important not for the information they contain, but because they publicly confront the regime with its own hypocrisy.

In a review in openDemocracy, Stein Ringen critiques The China Model, a new book that argues that successful Chinese meritocracy is preferable to failing western democracy.

In Open Society Foundations’ Voices blog, Marius Dragomir looks at a Venezuelan investigative journalist who has launched a website to publish stories not covered by the state-dominated media. (In case you missed it, our Venezuela blogger, Juan Nagel, recently profiled another independent Venezuelan web site.)

In a New York Times op-ed, Sinan Ulgen takes stock of the opportunities and challenges facing Turkey in the wake of its historic elections. (In the photo, a supporter of the pro-Kurdish Peoples’ Democratic Party celebrates the election results in Diyarbakir.)

The Ford Foundation’s president, Darren Walker, announces the Foundation’s new grant-making strategy, which will focus on addressing the causes of inequality.

And finally, NPR’s Bob Mondello reviews a brutal new Ukrainian film, The Tribe, which portrays an ultra-violent boarding school for the deaf — all without a single word of dialogue.

Photo credit: BULENT KILIC/AFP/Getty Images