Growing Russian influence in the Balkans is undermining democratic institutions and retarding regional states’ prospects of accession to the European Union, observers suggest. The EU is launching a diplomatic… Read more »
Yascha Mounk’s The People vs. Democracy argues that while liberals took liberalism’s permanence for granted, voters became “fed up with liberal democracy itself,” notes Sohrab Ahmari. Mounk has also collected mountains… Read more »
Political leaders willing to fight for human rights principles showed that they could limit authoritarian populist agendas, Human Rights Watch said in launching its new World Report 2018: When leaders push… Read more »
Seven years after the revolution, many Tunisians are losing faith in a democratic transition that was meant to bring wider prosperity, The Economist notes: A poll by the International Republican… Read more »
Global confidence in US leadership has fallen to a new low, according to a Gallup poll conducted across 134 countries, CNN reports: The US rating is down nearly 20 points from… Read more »
Global democracy declined for the 12th consecutive year in 2017. According to a new report from Freedom House, twice as many countries registered reversals in political rights and civil liberties as scored… Read more »
The ‘Western ideal’ – a concept embodied in the democratic processes and free-market economies of the West – has long been a powerful draw for others, including originally for the… Read more »
Are Western actions to blame for the steady deterioration in U.S.-Russia relations? While the Kremlin’s view of the West has long been hostile, the spread of “color revolutions” in the… Read more »
Even more than his predecessors, Chinese President Xi Jinping has led a massive expansion of efforts to shape foreign public opinion in order to influence the decision-making of foreign governments… Read more »
China’s influence operations are “strategic and multifaceted”, The Guardian notes: The National Endowment for Democracy recently described other aspects as “sharp power”: the effort by authoritarian states not just to attract support… Read more »