Author Archives: DemDigest

Egypt moves to enhance authoritarian rule

     

Proposed amendments to Egypt’s constitution, including granting the armed forces authority to intervene in government, would undermine judicial independence and expand executive powers that are already being abused, Human Rights… Read more »

Allow US Global Media to do its job: promoting freedom

     

U.S. Global Media is the leading instrument of American soft power in authoritarian countries and struggling democracies, notes A. Ross Johnson, a history and public policy fellow at the Woodrow… Read more »

Venezuela: beware the ‘dark side’ of negotiated transitions

     

Will a negotiated settlement resolve Venezuela’s political standoff? Opposition leader Juan Guaidó has endorsed a proposal to amnesty to the military if it repudiates the Maduro regime and facilitates a restoration of… Read more »

Liberalism in retreat in world’s largest democracy?

     

India’s liberal democracy is now under assault, as evidenced by a pattern of assaults on minorities, press freedom, and the independence of key cultural and intellectual institutions, argues analyst Sumit Ganguly,. co-author of… Read more »

Artificial intelligence a tool in fight against fake news?

     

A coalition of European human and digital rights groups has signed an open letter to Facebook  demanding far greater transparency about how its platform distributes and amplifies political ads ahead of elections to… Read more »

China’s sharp power: is talk of new ideological Cold War ‘overblown’?

     

China’s media is being wielded as a tool to shape public opinion and serve the ideological aims of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across the globe. And, as a part… Read more »

Cuba’s new constitution: window-dressing for single-party rule?

     

Cuba’s revised constitution amounts to window-dressing for continued single-party rule, some of the island’s democratic and civil society voices will tell a Washington forum next week. An Organization of American… Read more »

Reclamation: new Arab discourse empowers civil actors

     

ISIS may be defeated and devoid of territory, but its ideology continues to spread, The [London] Times reports. Jihadi fighters are not necessarily driven by religious ideology, disenfranchised or lacking… Read more »

Why Democracy Is So Hard to Build

     

Today’s pessimism about democracy is both historically unwarranted and self-defeating; it undermines the optimism necessary to sustain the struggle ahead, argues Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard… Read more »

How Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating democracies

     

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist values—and lost, argues analyst Franklin Foer. The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from… Read more »