Author Archives: DemDigest

From ‘Death to the Shah’ to ‘Death to the Dictator’: Iran’s revolution turns 40

     

Next week, the Islamic Republic of Iran will mark the 40th anniversary of the popular overthrow of its pro-Western monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Atlantic Council writes. Iran will be… Read more »

Democracies need ‘new capabilities’ to counter information warfare

     

Democracies need to develop “new capabilities” to counter authoritarians’ information warfare, says a senior U.S. official. “We need to give renewed emphasis to the information environment,” said Andrew Knaggs, deputy… Read more »

Venezuelan opposition ‘testing military’s loyalty’

     

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today demanded Venezuela reopen a bridge on the Colombian border for an aid shipment organised by the opposition, the BBC reports: Venezuelan soldiers have… Read more »

China ‘trying to take the world hostage’?

     

Discussions of what China’s rise will mean for the world often take on an abstract, impersonal quality, notes Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School… Read more »

Five years after Euromaidan: assessing Ukraine’s grassroots activism

     

Ukrainian civil society activists protested near the Presidential Administration and the office of Yulia Tymoshenko’s party on Feb. 4, demanding justice for slain activist Kateryna Gandziuk, the Kyiv Post reports…. Read more »

Polarization a key factor in democracy’s ‘alarming’ decline

     

The latest Freedom in the World report – compiled by more than 100 experts and drawing on data from 209 countries – describes an “ominous” global erosion of democratic values… Read more »

Democracy & the Illiberal Temptation

     

The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived, but it should at least be possible to figure out a systematic… Read more »

How to renew trust in democracy

     

How to restore trust in democracy and the media that serve it and us? More specifically, what can leaders, media and citizens do to better understand the “other,” to distinguish… Read more »

Democracy in retreat: ‘ominous’ decline around the world, says Freedom House

     

Democracy is undergoing an ‘alarming’ decline around the world, according to the latest annual survey from Freedom House.* The country-by-country report – Freedom In The World 2019 – paints a… Read more »