Category: Analysis

What went wrong in Central and Eastern Europe? A case for ‘pessoptimism’

     

There’s has been extensive and ongoing debate about “what went wrong in Central and Eastern Europe” and what explains its various forms of illiberalism and democratic decline. A variety of,… Read more »

Africa’s ‘engines of democracy’

     

By 2040—a decade before Africa’s population is forecast to reach 2.1 billion, or double what it is today—the continent will become majority urban. That means over a billion people in… Read more »

Taiwan ‘battling a wave of online disinformation’

     

Taiwan is the territory most exposed to foreign disinformation from you-know-where, research suggests. Thousands of lies flood social media every day in Taiwan, a new frontier of information warfare. Scholars say… Read more »

Can Japan help to reshape the liberal international order?

     

Can Japan help defend and revive the “liberal order” – the system of guiding principles that governed conduct among western democracies after World War II – asks Paul Nadeau, an adjunct fellow… Read more »

Populists fanning flames of identity politics: From constitutional democracy to unconstitutional ethnocracy

     

Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s victory fills analyst Max Boot with fear and foreboding. It’s not just because his reelection makes it certain that Brexit — a plan that will further fracture… Read more »

‘Distortion, dissembling and digital skulduggery’: Disinformation becoming normalized in elections

     

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a London-based think-tank, is warning that ‘disinformation is becoming normalized‘ in elections, adding that it was ‘taken aback’ by the level of deceit in the… Read more »

China’s corrosive capitalism conflicts with West’s liberal meritocratic model

     

China’s economic success undermines the West’s claim that there is a necessary link between capitalism and liberal democracy, argues Branko Milanovic, a Senior Scholar at the Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality… Read more »

‘Zero Corruption’: feasible or fantasy?

     

A court in Bishkek has ruled to freeze the bank accounts of RFE/RL’s Kyrgyz Service, locally known as Azattyk, its correspondent, and the Kyrgyz news site Kloop following their joint… Read more »

A Season of Caesarism?

     

In 1978, the UC Berkeley political scientist Jyotirindra Das Gupta gave the term “A Season of Caesars” to the wave of authoritarian emergency regimes that were sprouting up in Asia… Read more »