Category: anti-democratic

Tillerson criticizes Russia’s use of hybrid warfare ‘to undermine Western institutions’

     

  U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson today criticized “Russia’s continued use of hybrid warfare” and its attempts “to undermine Western institutions” in a reference to the mix of state-sponsored… Read more »

Does Xi – China’s most powerful leader since Mao – plan to ‘do a Putin’?

     

China’s ruling party moved on Tuesday to confirm Xi Jinping’s status as the country’s most powerful leader in decades by adding his name and ideology to its constitution. Xi’s concept… Read more »

How to stop Russian propaganda winning the information war

     

The Russians who posed as Americans on Facebook last year tried on quite an array of disguises. There was “Defend the 2nd,” a Facebook page for gun-rights supporters, festooned with… Read more »

How illiberals, uncivil society transition from protest to power

     

Civil society activists have often struggled to make the transition from protest to politics, to effect a shift from social movement to party in power. Illiberal and authoritarian movements –… Read more »

How Putin made corruption great again

     

Russian police arbitrarily detained hundreds of people during peaceful protests on June 12, 2017, in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Human Rights Watch said today: Riot police in both cities used… Read more »

Deconstruction of the West? The real challenges to the liberal world order

     

In both developed and developing states, challenges to the liberal order are converging on a single main competitor, populist nationalism, which is a response to the tension between two central… Read more »

Hungary’s ‘political vandalism’ threatens CEU, civil society

     

Hungary said it will not withdraw new legislation to regulate foreign universities that a Budapest college founded by American financier and philanthropist George Soros says could force it out of… Read more »

S. M. Lipset & democracy’s fragility

     

  If Seymour Martin Lipset had lived, he would have celebrated his 95th birthday on 18 March. Today, his prolific scholarship remains as timely and influential as when he was an… Read more »

The third counter-wave to democracy and liberalism. What’s next?

     

If history shows that successive waves of democracy are followed by anti-democratic reaction, the current surge of authoritarian, illiberal or populist politics should suggest that we’re eventually due a democratic… Read more »

Electoral espionage is ‘political warfare’

     

Russia “is up to all sorts of no good,” British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said today, two days after announcing a plan to visit Moscow. “They are, I’m afraid, engaged… Read more »