Author Archives: DemDigest

U.S.-ASEAN summit needs more than symbolism

     

  Human rights and democracy advocates are calling on President Barack Obama to use the occasion of this week’s U.S.-ASEAN summit at California’s Sunnylands retreat to publicly raise concerns about… Read more »

Is presidentialist democracy failing?

     

Perplexed by today’s turbulent American political scene? Not to worry: A distinguished political scientist wrote an essay 26 years ago that anticipated our predicament with eerie explanatory power. The only… Read more »

Colombia’s post-conflict transition: five challenges

     

The Colombian case breaks all previous patterns and will surely become a model for overcoming non-international armed conflicts, argues Jean Carlo Mejía, a university professor and independent advisor and consultant… Read more »

South Africa heading for crisis, collapse and ‘regime change’?

     

Amid heckling from the opposition, the South African president used his State of the Nation speech to try and redeem himself following a spending scandal. But calls for him to… Read more »

Angola in crisis: transparency, human rights & civil society

     

  Current events suggest that Angola today faces an economic and political crisis. The global collapse of oil prices, a series of anti-NGO regulations, repressed protests, and the trial of… Read more »

Arab voices address challenges of New Middle East

     

Five years after the Arab Spring, the crisis of legitimacy that helped precipitate it has lost neither its resonance nor its urgency, according to a qualitative survey of Arab experts… Read more »

‘Great Surge’ marks end of the Third World

     

  The assertion that democracy is better than autocracy at facilitating the move into prosperity butts up against the theory that authoritarianism is more conducive to rapid economic growth (as… Read more »

Internet security in the age of the Islamic State

     

Last month, the State Department revamped its efforts to target online radicalization and recruitment by the Islamic State, and similar initiatives are being undertaken in other countries. For example, Europol… Read more »