Author Archives: DemDigest

#ConCaracas: Venezuela approaching tipping point?

     

  A major opposition protest planned for September 1 could determine the political future of Venezuela’s President Nicolás Maduro. Opposition leaders say they will take to the streets of the capital Caracas to insist… Read more »

Tunisian party ‘separating Islam from politics’

     

The Ennahda movement has renounced political Islam and fully embraced Tunisia’s secular order, seeking to work within it, Taylor Luck reports for The Christian Science Monitor: Ennahda’s journey from a… Read more »

Creativity needed in defending, funding civil society

     

In the wake of the widespread authoritarian crackdown, we are witnessing a confluence of factors affecting the sustainability of different aspects of civil society (its organizations, actors and actions) in… Read more »

Keeping transitions peaceful

     

  According to the 2016 Fragile States Index, six of the eight most fragile states—countries that have weak, ineffective, or illegitimate governments and conditions that exacerbate corruption, poverty and violence–are… Read more »

Palestine: crackdown on journalists, civil society activists

     

The Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza are arresting, abusing, and criminally charging journalists and activists who express peaceful criticism of the authorities, Human Rights Watch said today:… Read more »

Nepal a ‘surprising focal point’ for democratic movement

     

Though strategically located between Asia’s two giants, India and China, Nepal’s political importance has derived more from its tortuous process of democratic transition over the last quarter of a century… Read more »

Reforming Ukraine after the revolutions

     

  Sergii Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem [above] were two muckraking journalists who had contempt for Ukraine’s corrupt political system. So they became politicians, Joshua Yaffa writes for The New Yorker:… Read more »

West faces ‘new Cold War’ with democracy under threat?

     

At the moment, the West is clearly losing the ideological battle for democracy, as two major anti-Western threats have emerged, George Mason University professor Jack A. Goldstone writes for World… Read more »

Latin America’s state institutions co-opted to bolster those in power

     

Nicaragua moved closer to one-party rule late last month, when the country’s Supreme Electoral Council unseated 28 opposition lawmakers and substitute lawmakers in the National Assembly, effectively handing full control… Read more »