Author Archives: DemDigest

Limit democracy to save liberalism?

     

While illiberal democracy is certainly worrying, many of its critics fundamentally misunderstand how democracy’s historical relationship with liberalism and how democracy has traditionally developed, notes Sheri Berman, a professor of… Read more »

Darkening web’s fake humans a threat to democracy

     

Danish troops will get training in how to deal with Russian misinformation before being sent to join a NATO military build-up in Estonia in January, Defense Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen… Read more »

Liu Xiaobo ‘will be proven right in the end’: death exposes Western kowtowing to China

     

It came as little surprise when, after the death of the dissident Liu Xiaobo last week, China’s vast army of censors kicked into overdrive as they scrubbed away the outpouring of… Read more »

Ecuador: ‘succession politics get ugly’

     

  When the government candidate eked out a victory in the bitter runoff for president of Ecuador in April, incumbent Rafael Correa was ebullient. The willful populist who ran the small Andean… Read more »

Liberal order cannot survive cultural unraveling of democracy’s baseline

     

The liberal international order cannot survive the unraveling of strong national communities that are the baseline of democratic government, says a leading analyst. There is an ever-expanding terminology generated to… Read more »

Remembering Liu Xiaobo: China’s strategy ‘born of weakness’

     

China is caught in a set of interlocking problems, notes STRATFOR analyst George Friedman: Its economic miracle has matured into more normal growth rates. It has a vast population that… Read more »

Crisis of confidence roiling liberal democracies?

     

In the wake of the recent Group of 20 summit, some commentators claimed that the chief threat to liberal democracy was not from the aggressively illiberal despots of Russia, North… Read more »

Dissident Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo dies – his legacy lives

     

Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, has died after being denied permission to leave the country for treatment for… Read more »

Cyberwarfare takes a new turn: China joins Russia’s ‘geoinformational struggle’ against West

     

  The recent “ransomware” attacks masked a greater cyber-issue: chaos and disruption on the Internet as the new normal, according to analysts Brandon Valeriano, Ryan C. Maness and Benjamin Jensen…. Read more »