What is Putin up to in Ukraine?
Escalating tensions between Russia and Ukraine are reflected in their media, with claims that both sides are trying to take advantage of alleged Ukrainian armed incursions in Crimea, the BBC… Read more »
Aid scandals highlight Palestinian ‘institutional decay and corruption’
Israeli prosecutors on Tuesday charged a employee of the United Nations in the Gaza Strip with providing material assistance to Hamas, the Islamist group that controls the territory, including helping… Read more »
Afrobarometer under threat
The consortium which runs Africa’s most authoritative public opinion surveys faces funding difficulties. Writing for AllAfrica, Johnnie Carson (right) says that coming at a time when democratic institutions are… Read more »
Nicaragua: ‘no one left to vote for’
The democratic transition that we Nicaraguans began in 1990, and the peacebuilding we undertook after a tragic war between brothers, relied on an essential foundation: honest and transparent elections, notes… Read more »
China’s crackdown on dissent the harshest in decades
China is in the midst of what many overseas scholars say is its harshest crackdown on human rights and civil society in decades, marked by officially-sponsored paranoia about foreign forces… Read more »
Leading Cuban Dissident’s ‘Moments of Optimism’ About Political Change
“We are suffering more arrests. They [state security forces] are beating us hard,” dissident Antonio Rodiles tells The Guardian’s Naomi Larson: It seems he has become desensitised to this violence…. Read more »
Political Shift Has Poland Assessing Its Values
In Poland, the biggest former Communist nation in the European Union and NATO, the question is whether the liberty and European identity that meant so much to those who toppled… Read more »
Democratizing Europe
In the wake of the UK’s Brexit vote, the European Union needs a renaissance, challenging inherited ideas about what cooperation between nations and peoples looks like. This renaissance should move… Read more »
Zambia polls: democracy hovering on a precipice?
Zambians go to the polls Thursday to elect a president for the second time in 19 months. The death of President Michael Sata in October 2014 triggered a special by-election… Read more »
After decade of Raul Castro, reform still lagging
Veteran Cuban dissident Guillermo Farinas was briefly hospitalized in Santa Clara on Friday after losing consciousness in his home on the 16th day of a hunger strike to protest government… Read more »