Ten years of China’s Belt and Road: what has $1tn achieved? https://t.co/p6cdPxq8Ws via @ft — Democracy Digest (@demdigest) October 23, 2023 China offers a coherent ideological alternative to the liberal-democratic… Read more »
South Asian democracies enter the 2023-2024 electoral years in a precarious state, as the rise of illiberal regimes, corrupted electoral processes, and more has led to democratic backsliding, the International… Read more »
Journalist Marvi Sirmed is still telling stories about honor killings of women in Pakistan though she’s now more than 7,000 miles away from her home country, Jaclyn Severance reports for… Read more »
The United States voiced concern on Thursday after a prominent activist said her ailing father had been thrown back into prison in what she saw as retribution for her outspokenness. Gulalai… Read more »
Advocates for independent news media used Sunday’s World Press Freedom Day to call attention to what’s been dubbed the “coronavirus crackdown,” CNN reports. Journalists in numerous countries have been harassed, threatened… Read more »
As leading authoritarian states exploit that Covid-19 pandemic to pursue a strategy of “co-option, coercion, and concealment,” as H.R. McMaster has summarized it, the old liberal order may rapidly… Read more »
He calls himself “Pakistan’s biggest feminist”, but soap opera writer Khalil-ur-Rehman Qamar sparked a national row this week after he hurled abuse at a women’s rights activist on live television,… Read more »
Manzoor Pashteen, the leader of an activist group that denounces abuses of power by Pakistan’s military, was arrested (HT:CFR) on charges including sedition and intimidation. Amnesty International called for Pashteen’s… Read more »
If digital platforms are the “new battleground” for democracy, as the new 2019 “Freedom on the Net” report from Freedom House suggests, the experience of Pakistan demonstrates the challenges of… Read more »
A Pakistani human rights activist who spoke out against the army has fled the country after months in hiding. Gulalai Ismail (above, far right) is now in the US, having eluded… Read more »