Category: Africa

The ‘Great Online Convergence’: Digital authoritarianism comes to democracies?

     

  Russian civil society continues to dismantle pro-Kremlin disinformation, using both laughter and journalistic investigations. February has been a good month for those Russians who want to push back against pro-Kremlin… Read more »

‘Nowhere To Hide’: Who’s proliferating digital authoritarianism?

     

Is China pursuing a grand strategy to systematically proliferate digital authoritarian tools? China’s efforts vary by country, local context, and its own interests, argues Steven Feldstein, Chair of Public Affairs… Read more »

Africa’s evolving regimes: Totalitarian or autocratic?

     

Perfidy – or, corruption and scandal – is one of the strongest predictors of dissatisfaction with democracy, note University of Cambridge researchers Roberto Foa and  Andrew James Klassen. Inevitably, more extreme… Read more »

RSF militia casts a shadow over Sudan’s transition hopes

     

Despite government efforts to wrestle the gold industry away from Sudan’s security services, questions remain about whether the country can transition to democracy while the politically powerful Rapid Support Forces,… Read more »

How to consolidate Sudan’s transition

     

The 2019 Sudanese uprising has led to a transitional government with a civil and military component. Consolidating a democratic transition will depend on the civil component’s ability to establish its… Read more »

Defending democracy in a post-truth world

     

  The post-truth world of alternative facts, deepfakes and other digitally disseminated disinformation is the territory explored by Samuel Woolley, an assistant professor in the school of journalism at the University of Texas, in The Reality… Read more »

‘No such thing as illiberal democracy’?

     

The rise of populism has made it fashionable among political scientists and the general public to argue that there are fewer differences between democracies and autocracies than previously thought, according… Read more »

China is winning the information war: How to counter Beijing’s narrative

     

A leading German university has been plunged into scandal after it emerged that it had signed a contract binding it to abide by Chinese law while accepting hundreds of thousands… Read more »

Sudan’s transition ‘a once in a lifetime opportunity’

     

The international community must immediately boost its support to Sudan to accelerate its democratic transition, allowing it to sustain peace and accelerate much-need development, said the Head of the United… Read more »

‘Democracy: From Theory to Practice’: Assessing decay, breakdown and renewal

     

The autocratic resurgence was a factor in prompting USAID to declare 2020 as the Year of Democracy and launch a campaign called #Democracy Is… in order “to highlight the interlocking… Read more »