Category: Civil Society

Russia’s fellow travelers aid disinformation in ‘cooler Cold War’

     

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Russian leader Vladimir Putin has been excised from two major upcoming releases. The move reportedly shows that Hollywood’s nerves are shredded after the cyber attacks… Read more »

‘A sickness beyond borders’ – understanding and combatting media capture

     

Recent developments in South Africa have highlighted how state capture has emerged as an increasingly dangerous threat to democratic governance and to prospects for democratic transition. According to a definition… Read more »

Cause for optimism on Zimbabwe’s transition

     

  Zimbabwe’s citizens have mostly relied on political parties and elections to make their preferences known, but there has been an upsurge in protests, demonstrations, petitions, campaigns, marches, and organizations… Read more »

Online and On All Fronts: Russia’s assault on opposition ‘reaching new heights’

     

Russia has introduced significant restrictions to online speech and invasive surveillance of online activity and prosecutes critics under the guise of fighting extremism, Human Rights Watch said in a report released… Read more »

Limit democracy to save liberalism?

     

While illiberal democracy is certainly worrying, many of its critics fundamentally misunderstand how democracy’s historical relationship with liberalism and how democracy has traditionally developed, notes Sheri Berman, a professor of… Read more »

Ecuador: ‘succession politics get ugly’

     

  When the government candidate eked out a victory in the bitter runoff for president of Ecuador in April, incumbent Rafael Correa was ebullient. The willful populist who ran the small Andean… Read more »

Dissident Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo dies – his legacy lives

     

Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, has died after being denied permission to leave the country for treatment for… Read more »

Cyberwarfare takes a new turn: China joins Russia’s ‘geoinformational struggle’ against West

     

  The recent “ransomware” attacks masked a greater cyber-issue: chaos and disruption on the Internet as the new normal, according to analysts Brandon Valeriano, Ryan C. Maness and Benjamin Jensen…. Read more »

A new era of competition: democrats vs. autocrats – and illiberals

     

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that democracies long failed to realize that a new era of competition was underway between autocratic and democratic states, notes Christopher Walker,… Read more »