Category: Authoritarianism

China’s annus horribilis: Authoritarian turn ‘challenges the world’

     

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 »

Roads to Modernity: Democratizing moral revolution

     

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 »

Self-regulating democracy – declared moribund, may be more resilient

     

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 »

In the conflict between ‘capitalist democracy’ and communism, capitalism won. But…..

     

The emerging competition between American and Chinese models of capitalism, the problem of inequality in developed societies, and the cultural contradictions of meritocracy, were the focus of The American Interest’s Damir… Read more »

2019’s ‘tsunami of protests’: democracy’s new hope or false dawn?

     

When historians look back at 2019, the story of the year will be the tsunami of protests that swept across six continents and engulfed both liberal democracies and ruthless autocracies,… Read more »

‘Managed Competition’? Meeting China’s challenge

     

China’s authoritarian leadership organizes and implements policies in ways that often are systemically incompatible with democratic, free market nations, according to a new report from the Scowcroft Center’s Transatlantic Security… Read more »

Russia’s Murder, Inc.’s long, dark history

     

  President Vladimir Putin said on Thursday Russia is not planning to create a military alliance with China, despite Moscow helping Beijing build a missile attack warning system, Reuters reports… Read more »

The Art of Deceit: How China and Russia’s sharp power subverts the West

     

For much of the last decade, China and Russia have been waging political warfare against the West – and we simply didn’t notice, says the co-editor of a new analysis…. Read more »

Which nation improved the most in 2019?

     

Two countries became notably less despotic in 2019. In Sudan mass protests led to the ejection of Omar al-Bashir, one of the world’s vilest tyrants. However, the risk that thugs from… Read more »

China’s Civilizational Challenge – a great leap forward to ….. ?

     

Beijing’s response to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests demonstrates that far from enabling China’s peaceful reunification, the “one country, two systems” model is undermining it, argues Chin-Huat Wong, a professor of… Read more »