Category: Democracy Assistance and Promotion

Beyond Dysfunction and Devastation: Iraq, the Arab Spring, and Lessons for Today

     

Kanan Makiya* has been described as the Arab world’s “Solzhenitsyn” for courageously bearing witness to unspeakable cruelty, notes the Foreign Policy Research Institute. His new critically acclaimed novel, The Rope, is… Read more »

Tunisian minister ousted for linking Saudi ideology with extremism

     

A religious affairs minister has been fired from the government after linking Saudi Arabia’s religious ideology with extremism, Deutsche Welle reports: The minister, Abdeljalil Ben Salem, had been relieved of… Read more »

Autocrats using ‘toxic election’ to pour scorn on democracy

     

Russia, China and Iran are among several authoritarian regimes seeking to use the U.S. election as an opportunity to project soft power, to undermine the attractiveness of liberal democracy, and… Read more »

Is ‘Populist International’ Undermining Western Democracy?

     

Europe’s populists share ideas and ideology, friends and funders, notes analyst Anne Applebaum. They cross borders to appear at one another’s rallies. They have deep contacts in Russia — they… Read more »

Media and Countering Violent Extremism: An Uneasy Relationship

     

The term “Countering Violent Extremism,” or CVE, is now commonly used to refer to a variety of tactics and strategies—usually employing tools for mass communication—to blunt the efforts of terrorists… Read more »

Modernizing Election Technology

     

Appropriate technology is more important than ever before for securing the integrity of elections, the Atlantic Council’s Rachel DeLevie-Orey, a Penn Kemble Fellow with the National Endowment for Democracy, tells… Read more »

Media freedoms under fire in Myanmar

     

With last November’s landslide election victory of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy, the outlook for a successful democratic transition in Myanmar seems more positive than ever,… Read more »

Addressing Violent Extremism in the Sahel: The Role of Civil Society

     

The Sahel region has received significant international attention as a new battleground for fighting extremism, made vulnerable by tensions between various communities, weak public institutions, food insecurity, and often unresponsive… Read more »

West must focus on countering Russian disinformation

     

The president of Bulgaria is the latest figure to warn that Russia is trying to divide and weaken Europe, the BBC reports: Rosen Plevneliev warned of Russian influence in his… Read more »

What the West can do to contain Russia’s aggression, disinformation

     

Even before the December 2011 protests — and his own reelection as president in March 2012 — Vladimir Putin had begun signaling the return of a more authoritarian and aggressive… Read more »