While Russian President Vladimir Putin brazenly violates international law on the Ukrainian front, his lobbyists in Western capitals operate in covert ways that allow for plausible deniability, notes Sergei Guriev,… Read more »
The new U.S. Appropriations Bill pushes back against the rise of authoritarianism by investing $2.9 billion for democracy programs globally, including $315 million for the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)…. Read more »
Are the authoritarians who grace, or disgrace, our world, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Vladimir Putin, more like or unlike their twentieth-century predecessors? Two new books, each with virtues of… Read more »
The European Union and Cuba yesterday held their second formal Human Rights Dialogue, under the EU-Cuba Agreement on Political Dialogue and Cooperation. The dialogue is supposed to enhance bilateral engagement… Read more »
Terms like “democratic recession” and “backsliding” are misleading and breed fatalism, diverting attention from potential paths out of the new authoritarianism, says a leading analyst. Authoritarians have now shown that… Read more »
Inside the Moscow courtroom where judges have just rejected Vladimir Kara-Murza’s appeal against his 25 year prison sentence. The Kremlin critic was convicted of treason in April. pic.twitter.com/i1ljaoY3V0 — Steve… Read more »
Putin’s and Xi’s exploitation of the autocrat’s playbook is posing profound challenges for democratic societies across continents, according to a new analysis. Moscow and Beijing have some significant advantages over… Read more »
Like his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin has believed for years that the West is in decline, dysfunctional, and self-obsessed. Domestic political fights, electoral upsets and quarrels among… Read more »
Is Russia on the road to dictatorship? The immense pressures generated by the war and Western sanctions could eventually bring about domestic political change in Russia, but the conceivable scenarios… Read more »
A little more than a decade after the Arab Spring swept away many autocratic regimes in the Middle East and plunged others into chaos, a new authoritarian order is settling… Read more »