The U.S. State Department has reportedly requested the deployment of Marines (HT:CFR) to protect the de facto U.S. embassy in Taiwan. The move comes against a background of China’s… Read more »
Countless news reports and analytical commentaries suggest that Europe is experiencing a rise of illiberal democracy. According to them, populist parties are espousing a highly majoritarian form of democracy, while… Read more »
China’s relentless rise and its more recent embrace of repressive tactics that recall the Mao era — a process accelerated by President Xi Jinping’s bid to stay in power indefinitely — have… Read more »
Attempts by the Chinese government to guide, buy, or coerce political influence and control discussion of “sensitive” topics are pervasive, and pose serious challenges in the United States and globally, particularly as China uses… Read more »
Lebanon-based businessmen who lost enterprises through dealings with members of Saudi Arabia’s royal family and others in the kingdom are closely watching a the anti-corruption campaign led by the… Read more »
The closing of civic space has become a defining feature of political life in an ever-increasing number of countries, according to Civil Society Under Assault: Repression and Responses, a new… Read more »
Egypt’s new authoritarian regime is rapidly closing the public space—cracking down on autonomous civil society and independent political parties, asphyxiating the practice of pluralist politics, and thwarting citizens’ peaceful and… Read more »
The central European states were the vanguards of communism’s collapse in the late 1980s, prompting a sense of inevitability about democracy’s benign coming, reinforced by the diverse figures who stepped… Read more »
A few hours before Vladimir Putin gave his 2014 new year’s speech, a shadowy group calling itself Shaltai Boltai — the Russian for Humpty Dumpty, the nursery rhyme character —… Read more »
Authoritarian regimes are increasingly adept at fragmenting and controlling the internet for purposes of censorship, surveillance, and internal and external propaganda and misinformation, note analysts Mario Loyola and James K…. Read more »