International

The International section captured the period that started with the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions of late 2010 / early 2011, ran through the Libyan and Syrian civil wars, and ended in the post-Arab-Spring consolidation period of 2013 — overlapping with the launch of the Open Government Partnership in September 2011 and its first eight-month cycle of National Action Plans from the founding-cohort countries (Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, Norway, the Philippines, South Africa, the UK, and the US).

The Libya coverage was particularly substantial — the U.S. and U.K. asset-freezes against the Gaddafi regime in March 2011, the biographical reference profiles of Gaddafi himself and of rebel commander Khalifa Haftar (returning to Libya after roughly two decades in Falls Church, Virginia), and the underlying questions about how the rebel command structure was forming and which exile figures were being brought back by which intelligence services. Egypt coverage tracked the post-Mubarak transition and Al-Qaeda's strategic-positioning response to revolutions its violence had not produced.

Outside the Arab Spring countries, the section covered Spain's 2011 election (when open-government commitments appeared in all four major parties' manifestos for the first time), Colombia's anti-discrimination law under President Santos, Macedonia's post-Ohrid ethnic-tensions environment, Rwanda under Kagame, and the W3C's regional-office expansion into Russia. The throughline was that open-government and digital-modernisation movements were forming in places the OECD-centric coverage often missed — and that the local political context shaped what those movements could plausibly achieve.