Category: Democracy Assistance and Promotion

Budding social activism, legitimacy crises feed Central Asia’s dramatic transformation

     

Central Asia is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Its governments face legitimacy crises at a time when long-standing leaders are being replaced by little-known, untested ones. Social contracts, by which citizens… Read more »

Do Southeast Asia elections signal a consolidation of illiberal rule?

     

  Since the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, civil society has flourished under the country’s burgeoning democracy. Observers even began calling Indonesia the most democratic nation in… Read more »

Turkish attack endangers Kurds’ resilient ‘democratic experiment’

     

  The Turkish attack on Syria endangers a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds, argues James L. Gelvin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Syrian… Read more »

Fukuyama vs. Navalny: Fighting fear in Russia

     

Last week, Warsaw hosted the fourth Boris Nemtsov Forum, welcoming dozens of prominent experts, journalists, and activists to discuss “fighting fear in Russia and beyond,” Meduza reports. On October 9,… Read more »

Where Americans and Europeans agree – and differ – on democratic values

     

How are American attitudes similar to or different from those measured in Europe? Are Americans more individualistic than their European counterparts? More religious? Do they value different things in politics? Results of a new Pew… Read more »

Ethiopia’s Abyssinian spring enters a critical phase

     

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office amid profound strife, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize just seven months before the country’s elections. The timing isn’t necessarily good. The… Read more »

‘Good Governance’ Promotion: Avoid state capture, enhance resilience

     

On Oct. 20, Bolivian President Evo Morales will go to the polls in search of a fourth term. Victory would extend his time in office to almost two decades, and… Read more »

Why history isn’t moving inexorably in the direction of democracy

     

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed that history was moving inexorably in the direction of democracy and free markets—that we’d reached the “end of history” and could… Read more »

How Ukraine became Eastern Europe’s ‘vibrant’ democratic success

     

When the Ukrainian autocrat Viktor Yanukovych fled to Russia after a popular uprising in 2014, thousands of citizens poured into Mezhyhirya, his 340-acre estate on the outskirts of Kiev, Michelle… Read more »

Targeted: How social media is breaking democracy

     

Russian government-backed cyber aggression is heightening concerns from the west following a spate of high-profile incidents, prompting threats of countermeasures from the likes of Nato, the EU and UK, the… Read more »