Author Archives: DemDigest

Russia and China seek new ‘client states’?

     

U.S. President Barack Obama raised eyebrows around the world with a difficult-to-interpret reference to Ukraine in his final annual State of the Union address that lumped the post-Soviet state and… Read more »

Is Poland a failing democracy?

     

Poland’s new right-wing government faces international demands to roll back radical changes to the country’s institutions, but the odds that it will suffer any serious punishment from Brussels are close to zero, analyst Jan Cienski… Read more »

Turkey: Erdogan’s ‘dangerous dance with radicalism’

     

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s flirtation with radical Islam in Syria and march from liberal democratic reformer to illiberal populist authoritarian have confused Americans trying to deal with Turkey, which… Read more »

China steps up crackdown on civil society, rights advocates

     

Chinese authorities have formally arrested China‘s most prominent woman human rights lawyer, Wang Yu, accusing her of subversion, as part of a crackdown on activists who have helped people fight… Read more »

Fears of illiberal Central Europe axis ‘overblown’?

     

Poland’s crackdown on the judiciary and public media, emulating Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s accumulation of power, has raised fears in the European Union of a new illiberal axis based… Read more »

Cuba: still condemned to silence

     

Dissident artists are no better off post-Fidel, and renewed relations with the US haven’t helped as many hoped or claimed they would, Ryan McChrystal writes for Index on Censorship: The… Read more »

The public sphere’s new enemies

     

All around the world, it seems, the walls are closing in on the space that people need to assemble, associate, express themselves freely, and register dissent, notes Chris Stone, president… Read more »

Exporting the Chinese Model?

     

  As 2016 begins, an historic contest is underway, largely hidden from public view, over competing Chinese and Western strategies to promote economic growth, notes Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow… Read more »

The authoritarian hijacking of soft power

     

A renewed struggle between democracy and authoritarianism has emerged, argues Christopher Walker, executive director of the International Forum for Democratic Studies at the National Endowment for Democracy. The decade-long democratic… Read more »

Requiem for the Arab Spring

     

  Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution shook the Middle East, setting off the hopeful uprisings that came to be known as the Arab Spring, AFP reports: But five years later, the countries… Read more »