Category: Democracy Assistance and Promotion

Ukraine’s soft-power struggle faces hard reckoning

     

When “little green men” invaded Crimea in the spring of 2014, Russian media went into overdrive, smearing Ukraine’s Euro-revolution as a “fascist coup d’état,” POLITICO reports: A group of professors and… Read more »

Who Wants to Unmake the West? Call for Transatlantic Renewal

     

  A United States hostile to the EU would be terrifying for Europe at any moment, but never more so than right now, analyst Michael Crowley writes for POLITICO, adding… Read more »

EU-US must win hearts and minds in Western Balkans

     

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has warned that Turkey’s approach to democracy and the rule of law are “deeply problematic” to the country’s future cooperation with the European Union. “These deep… Read more »

The civic media crisis: what can be done?

     

The media, civil society, and democracy are under unprecedented duress around the world. It is important to see these phenomena as interconnected—to understand that the decline of the civic media… Read more »

Democratic modernity ‘not enough’ for CEE

     

The illiberal, populist drift in Central and Eastern Europe is a consequence of disillusion with the European Union as well as historical legacies, says a prominent analyst. “These countries had… Read more »

China trying to provide ideological alternative to Western liberalism?

     

As if any reminder were needed, delegates to China’s ceremonial parliament were repeatedly told in no uncertain terms this week what job No. 1 is: “Follow the leadership of the… Read more »

‘Secularizing Islamists’ – lessons for countering violent extremism

     

The experience of the Islamic political parties in North Africa shows that they are, just like non-Islamic parties, capable of change and adaptation to changing circumstances, says Mohammed Masbah, an… Read more »

Kazakhstan’s ‘authoritarian lite’ regime hints at cosmetic change

     

Kazakhstan’s leader, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is the country’s only president since independence — elected five times with 97.5 percent of the vote. Nazarbayev has created a kind of “authoritarian lite” system… 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 »