Category: National Endowment for Democracy

Why Democracy Is So Hard to Build

     

Today’s pessimism about democracy is both historically unwarranted and self-defeating; it undermines the optimism necessary to sustain the struggle ahead, argues Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard… Read more »

Five years after Euromaidan: assessing Ukraine’s grassroots activism

     

Ukrainian civil society activists protested near the Presidential Administration and the office of Yulia Tymoshenko’s party on Feb. 4, demanding justice for slain activist Kateryna Gandziuk, the Kyiv Post reports…. Read more »

Democracy & the Illiberal Temptation

     

The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived, but it should at least be possible to figure out a systematic… Read more »

How to renew trust in democracy

     

How to restore trust in democracy and the media that serve it and us? More specifically, what can leaders, media and citizens do to better understand the “other,” to distinguish… Read more »

Democracy in retreat: ‘ominous’ decline around the world, says Freedom House

     

Democracy is undergoing an ‘alarming’ decline around the world, according to the latest annual survey from Freedom House.* The country-by-country report – Freedom In The World 2019 – paints a… Read more »

How China’s sharp power takes aim at democracy

     

As Chinese power grows, Stanford University’s  Larry Diamond breaks down Beijing’s efforts to direct “sharp power” against democratic institutions, notes War On The Rocks. The key battleground appears to be… Read more »

Russian efforts to subvert democracies demand counter info-ops campaign

     

  Vladimir Putin is committed to dividing and destroying the West’s democracies, according to a former confidante. From our conversations in 1992, I realized that Mr. Putin understood that it… Read more »

Is inequality undermining democracy?

     

  Is growing inequality undermining democracy? asks Staffan I. Lindberg, a professor of political science and the director for the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg. The latest Varieties of… Read more »

How Khomeini betrayed the democratic promise of the Iranian revolution

     

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini betrayed the principles of the Iranian revolution after sweeping to power in 1979, leaving a “very bitter” taste among some of those who had returned with him… Read more »

‘A Case of Irresponsible Asset Return’ benefits Kazakhstan kleptocracy

     

Following a year-long investigation, the Corruption and Human Rights Initiative (CHRI) have published their full findings on Kazakhstan II, produced in collaboration with the Eurasia Democracy Initiative. Kazakhstan II is… Read more »