Category: Democratic institutions

Burma’s civil society challenged by ‘misleading top-down transition’

     

How did Burma’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi go from Nobel Peace Prize laureate to figurehead for a regime accused of genocide? After Myanmar’s political reforms in 2011, Western… Read more »

From Gutenberg to Google: Disinformation wars ‘only just getting started’

     

British populist Nigel Farage and his Brexit party have voted against stronger European Union measures aimed at countering “highly dangerous” Russian disinformation, the Guardian reports: The party cast their votes… Read more »

Fulfilling the promise of 1989: Time for a second liberation of ‘profound renewal’

     

On the tenth anniversary of 1989, at the brink of the millennium, we could celebrate both the original triumph of the velvet revolutions and great subsequent progress. By the twentieth… Read more »

Countering Political Polarization: What Has Been Tried? What Works?

     

  By Thomas Carothers and Andrew O’Donohue* Severe political polarization is tearing at the seams of democracies around the world, from Brazil, India, and Kenya to Poland, Turkey, and the… Read more »

Russia’s maturing opposition confronts ‘calibrated repression’

     

Russia has declared opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation a “foreign agent”. The move by the justice ministry means the organisation will now be subject to more checks by the authorities,… Read more »

Democracy on a knife edge: authoritarian populism vs constitutional liberalism

     

Creeping cooperation between mainstream parties and the populist right, unthinkable only a couple of years ago, has become strikingly common at the local level, with potentially cascading consequences for European… Read more »

CEE democracy ‘in mortal danger’ or illiberalism facing a backlash?

     

Democracy is in mortal danger in Poland, in part because of the failure of the opposition, says a leading analyst. Here is a government that spreads unsupported conspiracy theories, is doubling… Read more »

Great power competition in MENA follows ‘ineffectual’ democracy promotion?

     

Over the last few years, a crisis of legitimacy has beset the liberal international order. In the context of global reassessment, the configuration of regional orders has come into question,… Read more »

Poland’s populist turn: A looming Hungarian scenario

     

Poland’s election on Oct. 13 is the biggest test of the Law & Justice Party’s durability, say Bloomberg analysts Wojciech Moskwa and Rodney Jefferson. It has increased its popularity by… Read more »

Tempered idealism: A saga of democratic disillusion?

     

Will the post–Cold War era in which U.S. foreign policy addressed such high-minded causes as nonproliferation, democracy promotion and humanitarian intervention turn out to have been a mere parenthesis between… Read more »