Author Archives: DemDigest

How to keep the human rights high ground

     

The U.S. is threatening to withdraw from the controversial U.N. Human Rights Council if it does not undertake “considerable reform,” Secretary of State Rex Tillerson warned a group of nine… Read more »

Beyond Daesh: Crisis of Governance and Imperative of Reform

     

  Some 89% of respondents to the annual Arab Opinion Index (AOI) survey expressed negative and very negative views about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL, or… Read more »

How Egypt’s activists became ‘Generation Jail’

     

Six years after the Arab Spring, Egypt’s democracy activists live under constant threat of prison — or worse, notes analyst Joshua Hammer. It was just six years ago that Ahmed… Read more »

How to preserve Tunisia’s fragile democracy

     

Tunisia’s top diplomat wants the U.S. to “reach out more” to the tiny North African nation for collaboration against the evolving threat posed by the Islamic State — and to… Read more »

In CEE populism, culture and identity ‘back with a bang’

     

In the face of an illiberal upsurge, the European Union is lacking leadership, while the election victory of Marine Le Pen would mean the end of the European project, says… Read more »

Growing threats to civil society

     

A healthy and functioning civil society is vital for human rights and democracy everywhere, the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission writes: Civil society organizations (CSOs) play a crucial role in… Read more »

Ukraine’s soft-power struggle faces hard reckoning

     

When “little green men” invaded Crimea in the spring of 2014, Russian media went into overdrive, smearing Ukraine’s Euro-revolution as a “fascist coup d’état,” POLITICO reports: A group of professors and… Read more »

Boris Nemtsov: The Man Who Was Too Free

     

In the shadow of the red brick Kremlin walls, an informal shrine marks the spot and the memory of Boris Nemtsov, a former deputy prime minister and President Vladimir Putin’s loudest critic,… Read more »

Who Wants to Unmake the West? Call for Transatlantic Renewal

     

  A United States hostile to the EU would be terrifying for Europe at any moment, but never more so than right now, analyst Michael Crowley writes for POLITICO, adding… Read more »