Category: Analysis

Budding social activism, legitimacy crises feed Central Asia’s dramatic transformation

     

Central Asia is undergoing a dramatic transformation. Its governments face legitimacy crises at a time when long-standing leaders are being replaced by little-known, untested ones. Social contracts, by which citizens… Read more »

‘Tsunami Democràtic’: Emerging risk of virtual societal warfare

     

Virtual societal warfare is a new category of cyberaggression that seeks to manipulate or disrupt the information essential for the effective functioning of economic and social systems, RAND researchers Michael… Read more »

Do Southeast Asia elections signal a consolidation of illiberal rule?

     

  Since the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, civil society has flourished under the country’s burgeoning democracy. Observers even began calling Indonesia the most democratic nation in… Read more »

Turkish attack endangers Kurds’ resilient ‘democratic experiment’

     

  The Turkish attack on Syria endangers a remarkable democratic experiment by the Kurds, argues James L. Gelvin, Professor of Modern Middle Eastern History at the University of California, Los Angeles. Syrian… Read more »

Where Americans and Europeans agree – and differ – on democratic values

     

How are American attitudes similar to or different from those measured in Europe? Are Americans more individualistic than their European counterparts? More religious? Do they value different things in politics? Results of a new Pew… Read more »

‘Good Governance’ Promotion: Avoid state capture, enhance resilience

     

On Oct. 20, Bolivian President Evo Morales will go to the polls in search of a fourth term. Victory would extend his time in office to almost two decades, and… Read more »

Why history isn’t moving inexorably in the direction of democracy

     

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, it seemed that history was moving inexorably in the direction of democracy and free markets—that we’d reached the “end of history” and could… Read more »

Social media ‘weaponized’: Collective action needed to halt ‘abuse and deception’ of democratic process

     

Should we accept that the current social media model is incompatible with a healthy democracy? Social media has changed the nature of democratic conversation, argues Andrew Marantz [@andrewmarantz], author of… Read more »

Eastern Europe divided on democracy 30 years after communism

     

Thirty years ago, a wave of optimism swept across Europe as walls and regimes fell, and long-oppressed publics embraced open societies, open markets and a more united Europe. Three decades… Read more »