Search Results for: democracy support

China’s Future a Dictator’s Dilemma: Communist Party’s Strategy for Survival

     

China’s Communist authorities fretting about potentially “subversive” civil society groups — such as rights lawyers and labor activists — have a new red flag: the upcoming birthday of former president… Read more »

Zambia Elections Show Closing Democratic Space in Southern Africa?

     

  Zambia’s President Edgar Lungu has been re-elected, according to official results, which are being challenged by the main opposition party, the BBC reports: The electoral commission said Mr Lungu… Read more »

What failed Soviet coup tells us about 21st-century populism

     

The abortive coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev twenty-five years ago this week and its aftermath have echoes today, argues Stephen Sestanovich, a Columbia University professor and senior fellow at… Read more »

Russia dreams of Turkey pivoting to ‘authoritarian international’

     

Turkey on Tuesday warned of rising anti-American sentiment and risks to a migrant deal with the European Union, ramping up the rhetoric in the face of Western alarm over the… Read more »

A case for electoral reform

     

  There is an electoral system that improves upon the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPP) or plurality method of election, at least in surfacing second and third (and lower-order) preferences, argues Donald… Read more »

‘Appropriate assistance’ to Ukraine could be vulnerable?

     

The Russian-backed president of a separatist region in Ukraine was wounded on Saturday in an assassination attempt, highlighting rising violence in the country’s east, The New York Times reports (HT:… Read more »

Global democratic recession – for now

     

The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »

China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’

     

Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »

Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent

     

  A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »