Six months ago, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s grip on power in Bangladesh appeared unbreakable. The ruling Awami League had just won a fourth successive term in an uncontested election, allowing it to remain in full control of the country’s institutions. With journalists, human-rights defenders, opposition members, and other critics facing politically motivated prosecution, prison, exile, and forced disappearance, the country’s continued descent into authoritarianism seemed certain. But suddenly, last month, student-led protests erupted across the country, fueled by outrage over a quota system that allocates government jobs to the ruling party’s allies. The state’s response – a violent crackdown that…

Seven years after his emergence as Nigeria’s military Head of State, in the third quarter of 1974, Yakubu Gowon placed a telephone call to the then Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Taslim Elias. The subject matter of the call, according to Atanda Fatayi Williams, then a Justice of the Supreme Court (and future CJN) himself, with whom the Chief Justice discussed the matter, was a complaint by the Head of State “about the manner in which the courts in the country were being used for the indiscriminate swearing of affidavits in which allegations of corruption were made against public functionaries.”…