Having failed to build a team that he can fully trust or establish strong state institutions, Mirziyoyev has become reliant on his family.
Galiya Ibragimova
{
"authors": [
"Thomas Carothers",
"Marina Ottaway"
],
"type": "other",
"centerAffiliationAll": "dc",
"centers": [
"Carnegie Endowment for International Peace"
],
"collections": [],
"englishNewsletterAll": "",
"nonEnglishNewsletterAll": "",
"primaryCenter": "Carnegie Endowment for International Peace",
"programAffiliation": "DCG",
"programs": [
"Democracy, Conflict, and Governance"
],
"projects": [],
"regions": [
"Middle East",
"Iraq"
],
"topics": [
"Political Reform",
"Democracy"
]
}REQUIRED IMAGE
Source: Carnegie
The Bush administration is pushing for elections in Iraq sometime next year. This extremely accelerated timetable is dangerous. Early elections in postconflict situations can produce unstable results and favor radical groups over still-emergent moderate forces.
Because the administration has made elections a requisite for Iraqi sovereignty and faces growing pressure to transfer sovereignty, delaying elections is not an option. The solution is to limit the current constitution writing to an interim document that provides the framework for the election of a constituent assembly and an interim government of national unity. This would produce an elected Iraqi government to which sovereignty can be transferred and create a framework for the longer-term process of political consensus building necessary to create permanent democratic institutions.
Click on link above for full text of this Policy Brief.
A limited number of print copies are available.
Request a copy
About the Authors
Marina Ottaway is senior associate and Thomas Carothers is director of the Democracy and Rule of Law Project at the Carnegie Endowment.
Resources





Carnegie does not take institutional positions on public policy issues; the views represented herein are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of Carnegie, its staff, or its trustees.
Having failed to build a team that he can fully trust or establish strong state institutions, Mirziyoyev has become reliant on his family.
Galiya Ibragimova
A prophetic Romanian novel about a town at the mouth of the Danube carries a warning: Europe decays when it stops looking outward. In a world of increasing insularity, the EU should heed its warning.
Thomas de Waal
For a real example of political forces engaged in the militarization of society, the Russian leadership might consider looking closer to home.
James D.J. Brown
What happens next can lessen the damage or compound it.
Mariano-Florentino (Tino) Cuéllar
The uprisings showed that foreign military intervention rarely produced democratic breakthroughs.
Amr Hamzawy, Sarah Yerkes