Category: Democratic institutions

Authoritarian challenges compromising the knowledge economy

     

In light of growing concern about malicious disruption during the global crisis, the United Nations’ Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) is playing a leading role in further developing a common framework… Read more »

Incompetence, impatience & impotence: Russia shows same traits that befell USSR

     

  The way Russian pro-governmental media approached Hungary’s “coronavirus coup” stand-off with the EU in the time of COVID-19 is in line with the outlets’ long-term attitude towards Hungary, notes… Read more »

China faces backlash as pandemic sets stage for ideological contest

     

China deliberately suppressed or destroyed evidence of the coronavirus outbreak in an “assault on international transparency’’ that cost tens of thousands of lives, according to a dossier prepared by concerned… Read more »

Covid-19 lockdowns temper labor movement’s May Day

     

With restrictions owing to the coronavirus pandemic in place around the world, many labor groups are marking International Workers’ Day on Friday in subdued fashion. But as a global coronavirus-induced… Read more »

Democratization downturn? Don’t blame ‘the Blob’

     

Globalization and democratization were supposed to mellow China and Russia and help them fit easily into the U.S.-led order. That hasn’t worked out as well as hoped, but that’s not… Read more »

Democracies vulnerable to crisis: Covid exacerbates weaknesses, says BTI

     

The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the very weaknesses that have marked the democratic erosion of the last decade in most of the 137 developing and transformation countries examined in the… Read more »

COVID-19 pandemic reveals malfeasance, misrule & maladroit propaganda  

     

In the absence of global democratic leadership, China is taking advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to proclaim the superiority of its authoritarian model, notes Keith B. Richburg, director of the… Read more »

Autocratic assertion meets democratic dereliction

     

The coronavirus pandemic must not be used as a pretext for authoritarian states to trample over individual human rights, or repress the free flow of information, the UN secretary general… Read more »

The Peronist & the pandemic: Argentina’s new hegemony or social chaos?

     

Argentina’s president, Alberto Fernández, and the country he leads are entering a dangerous new phase, the Economist reports. Pressure to ease the lockdown is building before the pandemic has peaked…. Read more »

Covid-19 exposing liberal order’s instabilities and weaknesses

     

The embeddedness of liberal democracies in an interdependent world characterized by relatively free cross-border flows of goods, services, assets and people has amplified the virulent effects of highly contagious deadly… Read more »