Tag: Larry Diamond

Technology in service of ideology: exporting China’s ‘digital totalitarian state’

     

How do you effectively govern a country that’s home to one in five people on the planet, with an increasingly complex economy and society, if you don’t allow public debate,… Read more »

From protest to politics: Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement’s ‘activist legacy’

     

Taiwan’s 2014 Sunflower Movement unleashed a wave of youthful activism that has profoundly reshaped the island’s political landscape, showing how activists can effect change through elections, notes Ming-sho Ho, a… Read more »

Are elected leaders ‘making the world less democratic’?

     

On the surface, recent shifts in governments show precisely what a functioning democracy is capable of—voters dictate what they want at the ballot box, analysts Lauren Leatherby and Mira Rojanasakul write for… Read more »

Why democracy is in trouble

     

  Is democracy in trouble? Nearly 30 years after Francis Fukuyama declared the end of history and the triumph of liberal democracy, this question is no longer outlandish. But current… Read more »

Anwar in the wings of Malaysia’s renascent democracy

     

The good news is that Najib Razak’s massively corrupt and incrementally despotic nine-year rule is over. The cautionary news is that Malaysia’s democracy is not yet fully secured, given the… Read more »

Malaysia poll confirms ‘no reason to give up on democracy’

     

  As Malaysia’s most powerful man, Najib Razak worked hard to keep the public from accessing information about a multi-billion dollar scandal at state fund 1MDB. Now they just might find… Read more »

Is democracy in its death throes? Declinism’s flaws and follies

     

A few years ago the US academic Larry Diamond declared that a “democratic recession” had set in after about 2006. The long global expansion of democracy that began with the… Read more »

Russian kleptocrats ‘fraught with anxieties’: why the latest sanctions will bite

     

The lives of Russian kleptocrats in Britain are suddenly fraught with new anxieties, the Washington Post reports: Critics in London of Russian President Vladimir Putin are reevaluating their need for… Read more »

Springtime for autocrats: the new caudillos

     

  Liberal democracy is threatened by populism of both left and right, according to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “For the first time in my life I am anxious… Read more »

Dismantling Reagan’s infrastructure of democracy in face of ‘authoritarian international’?

     

The State Department’s fiscal 2019 budget request is a proposal not only to slash the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy but also to disassemble its relationships with its core institutes,… Read more »