Seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy helped bring… Read more »
Illiberals are neither fully committed to civil liberties – such as freedom of expression, assembly and association – and the rule of law, nor totally devoted to the institutions that… Read more »
For China’s one party-state, the West’s promotion of liberal democracy is part of an ideological struggle led by an adversary that is still vastly superior, a situation that Chinese strategists… Read more »
The scholar Hélène Landemore, a professor of political science at Yale, has spent much of her career trying to understand the value and meaning of democracy and trying to solve… Read more »
The autocratic resurgence was a factor in prompting USAID to declare 2020 as the Year of Democracy and launch a campaign called #Democracy Is… in order “to highlight the interlocking… Read more »
The “politics of imitation” is a phrase that recurs innumerable times in The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy by Ivan Krastev (above) and Stephen Holmes,… Read more »
The cluster of organizations around the National Endowment for Democracy has evolved into “a huge apparatus” with its strong norms and operational principles, one expert observes, at a time when… Read more »
Central and Eastern Europe’s transition to democracy has not been smooth. But there are grounds for hope, notes Alison Smale. What would Vaclav Havel have made of post-1989 developments? she asked… Read more »
Thirty years after the Berlin Wall fell, ending the Cold War in Europe, new political divisions are rising between East and West. Despite the economic success of German reunification and… Read more »
The authoritarian resurgence threatens to bring back the great power competition that caused so much destruction during the first half of the 20th century, argues Mathew J. Burrows, director of… Read more »