Cuba’s ‘big change’ – China-on-a-daiquiri?
Fidel’s brother [Raul Castro] has clearly been thinking ahead in a way the aging Fidelistas in the Cuban Communist Party have not, notes Alma Guillermoprieto. He may be trying… Read more »
Author Archives: DemDigest
Will the ‘Trump effect’ boost world’s authoritarians?
Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican presidential candidate has already dealt an enormous blow to the reputation of the American political system, and indeed to the reputation of democracy itself,… Read more »
After the Arab Spring: democratization, authoritarianism, and radicalization
The struggle over the future of Islam is not taking place within the West or between the West and Islam, argues Carl Gershman, the President of the National Endowment for… Read more »
Obama must raise Vietnam’s rights abuses, civil society crackdown
Thich Quang Do, the Patriarch of Vietnam’s Unified Buddhist Church (left), has called on U.S. president Barack Obama to use his forthcoming trip to the Communist state to highlight continuing… Read more »
Latin America’s digital media aid entrepreneurship
Entrepreneurs tend to take for granted how easy it is to start media companies in the U.S., notes Ricardo Bilton. The abundance of capital and potential ad revenue and lack… Read more »
The real purpose of China’s new anti-NGO law
China’s new anti-NGO law is evidence of a xenophobic shift in the country’s politics, an anti-foreign turn driven by several related trends, The Wall Street Journal notes: First, President Xi Jinping has… Read more »
New isolationism or a strategy for democratic renewal?
A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this, The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing… Read more »
Egypt faces backlash on freedom of expression
The US State Department and the European Union have urged Egypt’s government to uphold basic rights to freedom of expression after security forces stormed the Press Syndicate. Egypt’s police… Read more »
Iranian activists use social media to demand justice, accountability
The public outcry over the rape and murder of six-year-old Afghan refugee Setayesh Ghoreishi (left) demonstrates how social media has allowed Iran’s civil society to hold accountable hardliners in the… Read more »
Strategies to Expand U.S. Engagement in a Competitive World Order
Today’s global security environment looks dramatically different than just a few years ago, notes The Center for a New American Security. From the return of geopolitics in the form of a… Read more »