Author Archives: DemDigest

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible: Lessons from the Fall of the Berlin Wall

     

Resisting the Tyranny of the Possible. This was moral revolution, a revolution of conscience rooted in cultural reclamation, and it resonated through the region because it was entirely congruent with… Read more »

Vietnam’s growing protest culture explained

     

The Formosa scandal in Vietnam has recently made international headlines and offered the international community a rare glimpse into the fringe, but steadily growing, culture of protest and activism in… Read more »

Democracy in China: It’s in the eye of the beholder?

     

China watchers in the West have been fruitlessly searching for signs of democracy for more than 25 years, notes Bruce J. Dickson, professor of political science at George Washington University. But… Read more »

What is Putin up to in Ukraine?

     

Escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine are reflected in their media, with claims that both sides are trying to take advantage of alleged Ukrainian armed incursions in Crimea, the BBC… Read more »

Aid scandals highlight Palestinian ‘institutional decay and corruption’

     

Israeli prosecutors on Tuesday charged a  employee of the United Nations in the Gaza Strip with providing material assistance to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory, including helping… Read more »

Nicaragua: ‘no one left to vote for’

     

The democratic transition that we Nicaraguans began in 1990, and the peacebuilding we undertook after a tragic war between brothers, relied on an essential foundation: honest and transparent elections, notes… Read more »

China’s crackdown on dissent the harshest in decades

     

China is in the midst of what many overseas scholars say is its harshest crackdown on human rights and civil society in decades, marked by officially-sponsored paranoia about foreign forces… Read more »

Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change

     

“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »