Germany, which took over the European Union’s rotating presidency on July 1, will put democratic values at the heart of the bloc’s economic recovery from the coronavirus pandemic, a policy… Read more »
The real question the pandemic raises for democracies and dictatorships is not whether democracies or authoritarian regimes are responding better to the pandemic, notes Dan Slater, a nonresident scholar in the Asia… Read more »
Advocacy in Restricted Spaces: A Toolkit for Civil Society Organizations is a menu of options to encourage new ideas about conducting advocacy in difficult contexts, produced by Lifeline, a… Read more »
The new despotism defies the standard distinction between democracy and authoritarianism, argues John Keane (above), Professor of Politics at the University of Sydney and WZB (Berlin). The “whip-smart resilience” of… Read more »
Ukraine is a front-line state in the struggle between European rule-based order and Russian kleptocratic autocracy. Since the Euromaidan Revolution in 2013–14, Russia has deployed a range of measures –… Read more »
States fail the same way businesses do – gradually and then suddenly, argues Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. There… Read more »
Tiananmen Massacre survivor and former political prisoner Yang Jianli (right) reflects on how poetry helped him endure captivity, and how art can sustain us amidst social distancing. First, we cannot… Read more »
Democracies are better equipped to cope with crises like the current Covid-19 pandemic and at less risk of institutional breakdown than many commentators believe, new research suggests. Comparisons of the… Read more »
Older democracies are better equipped to cope with crises like the current Covid-19 pandemic, while the risk of institutional breakdown is greater in new democracies with weak civil society and weak… Read more »
In human history, national emergencies, whether caused by war, invasion, financial crisis, or an epidemic, have often been the occasions for major political reform. It takes a huge external shock… Read more »