Category: COVID-19

‘Dynamism Despite Disruption’: Will pandemic undercut or rejuvenate civil society

     

In many countries, restrictive laws already had been squeezing civil society before the Covid-19 crisis hit. The pandemic provides a convenient cover for governments to further tilt the balance of power… Read more »

Why Russia’s Power Vertical is failing the COVID-19 Challenge

     

Russia is hardly the only country struggling to respond to the pandemic. But the political consequences of an inadequate response are much greater for a highly centralized and deeply personalized… Read more »

Autocrats present liberal democracies with an ideological challenge

     

The remote northern Russian region of Komi is a coronavirus petri dish for the horrors lying in wait for the world’s largest country. Amid growing evidence that the pathogen had… Read more »

China’s propaganda aims to obscure ‘crime against humanity’?

     

China’s top leader, Xi Jinping, has used the coronavirus pandemic to shore up his political power at home, but the tools the Communist Party has exploited to do this are threatening… Read more »

Is China winning? Covid-19 a ‘unique stress test’ of political resilience

     

Like an asteroid, coronavirus is the textbook example of an exogenous shock. The threat came from beyond. Yet the pathogen offers a unique stress test of each country’s resilience, argues… Read more »

CCP rule by fear endangers Chinese citizens – and the world

     

As China tames the coronavirus epidemic now ravaging other countries, its success is giving rise to an increasingly strident blend of patriotism, nationalism and xenophobia, at a pitch many say… Read more »

Avoiding authoritarian pitfalls during Covid-19 crisis

     

  The political effects of the Covid-19 crisis are likely to be profound, Stanford political scientist Larry Diamond writes for the Atlantic Monthly: In the medium to long run, the… Read more »

Pestilential ‘battle of narratives’ a return to ideologies?

     

Surely among the strangest and least expected outcomes of the Great Pestilence is that the country that hatched the virus looks as though it will now enjoy the technological and… Read more »

Post-Corona World Disorder: Time to rethink West’s values trade-off?

     

The harsh, unavoidable “reality is the world will never be the same” following the Covid-19 pandemic, according to former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Democracies like the United States can… Read more »

‘Viral Alarm’: China’s rulers enter new era of moral depletion

     

In the six days after top Chinese officials secretly determined they likely were facing a pandemic from a new coronavirus, the city of Wuhan at the epicenter of the disease… Read more »