Despite the fact that he took office as an utter political neophyte in one of Europe’s most dysfunctional nations, Volodymyr Zelensky’s government so far has been an extraordinary — and,… Read more »
Xi Jinping promotes the view that China’s system presents an alternative to free-market democracy. And yet Beijing’s sprint for soft power* has been less successful than one might assume, The New… Read more »
While Russian President Vladimir Putin celebrates 20 years in the Kremlin and poses as a powerful world leader, his Russian Federation is showing increasing signs of fracture, according to Janusz Bugajski, a senior… Read more »
The populist test to liberal democracy will remain robust throughout the 2020s, argues Yasmeen Serhan, a London-based staff writer at The Atlantic: Across Europe, populist leaders have displayed their willingness to… Read more »
Around the world, democracies are getting weaker and elected politicians are becoming more unpopular. Are they serving the people—or themselves? The Economist asks (see below). The Crisis of Democracy and… Read more »
Is the DC-based Foreign Policy Research Institute the latest victim of an online disinformation program? Aaron Stein, the Director of the Middle East Program and a 2019 Templeton Fellow at… Read more »
Zdenek Hrib had been in office for only a couple of months when he first locked horns with Beijing. The youthful mayor of Prague was welcoming diplomats to a reception… Read more »
More than a dozen Chinese lawyers and activists are reportedly missing or were detained by authorities in the final days of 2019 as part of the Chinese government’s year-end crackdown… Read more »
While political scientists tend to focus on institutional reforms as a route to democratic renewal, there are also more old-fashioned ways to boost civic fabric, The FT’s Gillian Tett argues…. Read more »
Democracy, repeatedly declared moribund by schadenfreudian pundits, may be more resilient than some acknowledge, notes Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University and the author of 10… Read more »