Category: Democratic Transitions

Fine-tuning support for Ukrainian democratization

     

Ukraine has made some progress along the path of democratization, but the government has stalled on many reform imperatives and has recently been mired in a debilitating political crisis, argues… Read more »

The Decline and Fall of the Arab State

     

A mere five years ago, the suggestion that Egypt would have experienced two changes of regime or that Tunisia would be in the midst of a democratic transition would also… Read more »

Dilemmas of Reform in Arab Transitions

     

  Arab states in transition are confronted with a seemingly intractable task: rebuilding state institutions and social contracts in an era of global change, notes analyst Yezid Sayigh. Conventional approaches… Read more »

Why it’s wrong to say the Arab Spring failed

     

  Simply dismissing the uprisings [of the Arab Spring] as a failure does not capture how fully they have transformed every dimension of the region’s politics, argues Marc Lynch, a… Read more »

Authoritarianism Goes Global

     

A new global competition in “soft power” is underway between democracy and autocracy, but only one side seems to be competing seriously, according to Christopher Walker, Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond,… Read more »

Is Democracy in Decline?

     

For all the commentary on democratic recession, there has been nothing like the kind of “reverse wave” that Samuel P. Huntington’s The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century… Read more »

Engage civil society in party-building to consolidate democracy

     

Criticizing U.S. missteps in promoting democracy is certainly reasonable—particularly in light of the debacles in Iraq and Libya—but elevating these criticisms into high doctrine and principled critiques of democracy promotion… Read more »