Opaque Uzbekistan confronts transition anxieties
Whether Islam Karimov, who has ruled Uzbekistan with astounding brutality for the past 27 years, is dead or alive, his era is almost certainly drawing to a close. Two questions… Read more »
Category: Civil Society
Tunisian party ‘separating Islam from politics’
The Ennahda movement has renounced political Islam and fully embraced Tunisia’s secular order, seeking to work within it, Taylor Luck reports for The Christian Science Monitor: Ennahda’s journey from a… Read more »
Creativity needed in defending, funding civil society
In the wake of the widespread authoritarian crackdown, we are witnessing a confluence of factors affecting the sustainability of different aspects of civil society (its organizations, actors and actions) in… Read more »
Palestine: crackdown on journalists, civil society activists
The Palestinian authorities in the West Bank and Gaza are arresting, abusing, and criminally charging journalists and activists who express peaceful criticism of the authorities, Human Rights Watch said today:… Read more »
Nepal a ‘surprising focal point’ for democratic movement
Though strategically located between Asia’s two giants, India and China, Nepal’s political importance has derived more from its tortuous process of democratic transition over the last quarter of a century… Read more »
Reforming Ukraine after the revolutions
Sergii Leshchenko and Mustafa Nayyem [above] were two muckraking journalists who had contempt for Ukraine’s corrupt political system. So they became politicians, Joshua Yaffa writes for The New Yorker:… Read more »
West faces ‘new Cold War’ with democracy under threat?
At the moment, the West is clearly losing the ideological battle for democracy, as two major anti-Western threats have emerged, George Mason University professor Jack A. Goldstone writes for World… Read more »
Latin America’s state institutions co-opted to bolster those in power
Nicaragua moved closer to one-party rule late last month, when the country’s Supreme Electoral Council unseated 28 opposition lawmakers and substitute lawmakers in the National Assembly, effectively handing full control… Read more »
Russia revives dezinformatsiya to weaken rivals
In Crimea, eastern Ukraine and now Syria, Russian President Vladimir Putin has flaunted a modernized and more muscular military, The New York Times reports: But he lacks the economic strength… Read more »
How Poland’s Law and Justice Party is threatening democracy
After simmering for nine months, the tension between Poland’s ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party and the country’s highest court, the Constitutional Tribunal, is coming to a boil, says R…. Read more »