Author Archives: DemDigest

Mobilizing for democracy? Five myths about protest movements

     

Lebanese security forces fired tear gas, rubber bullets and water cannons Sunday to disperse hundreds of protesters for a second straight day, ending what started as a peaceful rally in… Read more »

Why China’s TikTok is a national security concern

     

TikTok, the short-form video app that’s been downloaded 1.5 billion times, is one of the most exciting and goofiest places on the internet, and possibly the only truly fun social… Read more »

What went wrong in Central and Eastern Europe? A case for ‘pessoptimism’

     

There’s has been extensive and ongoing debate about “what went wrong in Central and Eastern Europe” and what explains its various forms of illiberalism and democratic decline. A variety of,… Read more »

Africa’s ‘engines of democracy’

     

By 2040—a decade before Africa’s population is forecast to reach 2.1 billion, or double what it is today—the continent will become majority urban. That means over a billion people in… Read more »

Taiwan ‘battling a wave of online disinformation’

     

Taiwan is the territory most exposed to foreign disinformation from you-know-where, research suggests. Thousands of lies flood social media every day in Taiwan, a new frontier of information warfare. Scholars say… Read more »

Video: Jobs and opportunities

     

Senior Program Officer, Mandela Washington Fellowship, Leadership Practice,  IREX, Washington, D.C. International Advocacy Officer, Human Rights House Foundation, Brussels, Belgium. Development and Funding Officer, Democratic Progress Institute, London, United Kingdom. The U.S…. Read more »

Can Japan help to reshape the liberal international order?

     

Can Japan help defend and revive the “liberal order” – the system of guiding principles that governed conduct among western democracies after World War II – asks Paul Nadeau, an adjunct fellow… Read more »

Populists fanning flames of identity politics: From constitutional democracy to unconstitutional ethnocracy

     

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s victory fills analyst Max Boot with fear and foreboding. It’s not just because his reelection makes it certain that Brexit — a plan that will further fracture… Read more »

‘Distortion, dissembling and digital skulduggery’: Disinformation becoming normalized in elections

     

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think-tank, is warning that ‘disinformation is becoming normalized‘ in elections, adding that it was ‘taken aback’ by the level of deceit in the… Read more »

China’s corrosive capitalism conflicts with West’s liberal meritocratic model

     

China’s economic success undermines the West’s claim that there is a necessary link between capitalism and liberal democracy, argues Branko Milanovic, a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality… Read more »