Laos: come clean on activist Somphone’s ‘disappearance’
The Lao government has made no progress accounting for civil society leader Sombath Somphone, who was forcibly disappeared on December 15, 2012. Four years after he was stopped at… Read more »
Category: Laos
‘Rebalancing’ to Asia falters in Laos?
Neither ‘Asian values’ nor any other form of regional exceptionalism can be invoked to justify authoritarian rule, President Barack Obama said in Laos today. “[D]emocracy can flourish in Asia because… Read more »
Market-Leninism: capitalism with Communist characteristics?
It would be a serious mistake to assume that Cuba’s economic opening, advanced by the Obama-initiated rapprochement, will necessarily usher in a new political era in Cuba, argues Brahma Chellaney,… Read more »
Autocrats’ bag of tricks for staying in power
Excluding hereditary monarchies, there are close to 40 countries around the world in which the national leader has been in power for 10 or more years, writes Freedom House analyst… Read more »