Michael Ignatieff begins his new post this fall as president and rector of the famed Central European University – about as politically charged a job there is right now in… Read more »
Back in 2011 and 2012, the root causes and drivers of the pro-democracy ‘Arab Spring’ protests were clear. The notion of a “new social contract” came to symbolise the popular… Read more »
It’s becoming commonplace in many African nations: as an election approaches, the internet goes dark. Gabon is the latest country to employ internet censorship during a closely contested election, but… Read more »
The hype about Tunisia’s political progress has become completely disconnected from the reality on the ground, argues Moncef Marzouki, who served from 2011 to 2014 as the first elected president… Read more »
A leading pro-democracy group has responded to allegations of bias and misleading reporting by President Ilham Aliyev of Azerbaijan. The regime attacked Freedom House for its reporting on its growing… Read more »
Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is turning against the unions that have helped put him in power. The state has set its sights on the Egyptian Federation of Independent Trade… Read more »
Democracy has been in retreat across Eurasia in recent years, and in many countries, the lure of Western political models has faded. But Georgia has been an exception, note analysts… Read more »
We needn’t look to the post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia (2003) and Ukraine (2004), let alone to the more recent demonstrations in Moscow against election fraud (2011–2012), for the source… Read more »
A new global “soft power” ranking recently reported that the democratic states of North America and Western Europe were the most successful at achieving their diplomatic objectives “through attraction and… Read more »
In the light of Ivan Ilyin’s rehabilitation as Russia’s leading ideologue, Moscow’s manipulations of elections should be seen not so much as a failure to implement democracy but as a… Read more »