To those it seeks to influence, the Chinese Communist Party can be an intimidating presence. The China scholar Perry Link once called the party “the anaconda in the chandelier,” the… Read more »
Can civil society finally take root in the world’s most oppressive country? In November 2017, the National Endowment for Democracy hosted a former high-ranking North Korean diplomat for a… Read more »
Ghana has had seven peaceful presidential and parliamentary elections since its transition from military rule in 1992. Successive Ghanaian governments have managed to maintain a fairly stable economy with some… Read more »
Iran in large part considers peaceful activism a “threat to national security,” and those who warn about festering popular grievances and rampant corruption are treated as seditionists, notes Tara Sepehri… Read more »
In the 1960s and 1970s, scholars studying postcolonial states began increasingly to focus on corruption as an impediment to prosperity, notes journalist Oliver Bullough, the author of The Last Man… Read more »
The new U.S. National Security Strategy raises a number of questions, the Eurasia Group’s Ian Bremmer writes for TIME: How does the principle of “America First” square with plans to promote democracy… Read more »
“The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” The line comes from one of Milan Kundera’s novels about the totalitarian experience in the twentieth century, “The… Read more »
….is the subject of the latest report from the National Endowment for Democracy’s Center for International Media Assistance. Herman Wasserman and Nicholas Benequista lay out a vision for how the… Read more »
By banning NGOs from receiving foreign funding, the Russian government has forced them to seek financial support at home. But state grants undermine civil society’s independence, notes Andrey Kalikh, a… Read more »
Riding a strong populist wave and exerting a brand of crisis, Rodrigo Duterte was elected to power in the Philippines in mid-2016. More than a year into his presidency, Duterte’s… Read more »