This brief consolidates key lessons and recommendations from several years of research conducted by the CSIS International Consortium on Closing Civic Space (iCon) regarding how civil society can respond to narrowing civic space.

The U.S. cannot ignore the need to deal with the facts of the Khashoggi murder, but the last few weeks have been a warning of a far broader problem. 

At this point, there is no way to avoid a long and painful effort to determine all the facts surrounding Khashoggi's death and establish the level of responsibility for all of the Saudis involved.

A spasm of reporting on Khashoggi, and a flood of OP-EDs dumping on Saudi Arabia – followed by a lack of in depth coverage of the problem – is no memorial to someone who seems to have died for trying to speak the truth.

On August 14, Salih Khater ploughed his Ford Fiesta into pedestrians and cyclists near the Houses of Parliament in downtown London, wounding several of them. 

Almost 66 million people worldwide have been forced from home by conflict. If recent trends continue, this figure could increase to between 180 and 320 million people by 2030.

There is a very real case for taking violent Islamic extremism far more seriously as a global threat, and for taking stronger measures to fight it. The United States was far too slow to react to the threat that ISIS and other violent Islamist extremist movements pose in Iraq...

The Trump Administration has inherited Syria as a land of lost options, and as a country where U.S. policy is broadly seen as a failure and a sign of growing American weakness in the Middle East.