Bruno Maçães: uncertainty

Transcript context

…In terms of social liberalism, why is it so different from the other Shiite countries? It is, of course, a very repressive dictatorship. But one thing I feel strongly about and that I would try to change in how we in the US and in Europe approach these things is, there are different shades of authoritarianism. I’m not even sure the word authoritarianism is a good one because it projects our experience into other parts of the world. But when you travel, for example, from Azerbaijan into Turkmenistan, then Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, you see that these countries are very different. You breathe an air of freedom in Kazakhstan that you certainly don’t breathe in Turkmenistan. We in the West tend to say they’re all the same. Because they’re not like us, they’re all the same. I think this is a big mistake. What’s the future of Nagorno-Karabakh?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.