Category: Authoritarianism

Protest to politics? Lessons & narratives from Lebanon’s 2018 elections

     

Last year, elements of civil society ran against the established traditional political parties in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections, drawing on the experience of the 2016 Beirut Madinati (“Beirut is my City”)… Read more »

Strategic Competition: Is China winning the ideological battle?

     

Beijing’s new national security White Paper flags the fact that America and China are now competing superpowers, and that China’s growing military forces are developing to the point where they… Read more »

Models for democratic renewal & resilience in an age of uncertainty

     

Why and how do authoritarian leaders gain popular support? In his book, Threat to Democracy: The Appeal of Authoritarianism in an Age of Uncertainty, social psychologist Fathali M. Moghaddam argues that… Read more »

Russia’s civil society aims to prevent Putinism after Putin

     

An important test of civil society in Russia is unfolding on the streets of Moscow. It suggests that despite the authoritarian rule of President Vladimir Putin over nearly two decades,… Read more »

Hong Kong protests have unnerved ruling Chinese Communist Party

     

Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests have unnerved the ruling Chinese Communist Party as it prepares to hold its an annual political retreat and as President Xi Jinping pushing high-tech security measures,… Read more »

Fostering open societies’ resilience to digital vulnerabilities

     

“They took your data. Then they took control.” The Great Hack, a new Netflix documentary exposes the dark underside of data exploitation through the personal odysseys of protagonists in the… Read more »

Protecting the roots of Putin’s power: Kremlin drops all pretense of democracy

     

Russian President Vladimir Putin has denied U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies claims that the Kremlin used disinformation and other tactics in the 2016 presidential election, Reuters reports: In an… Read more »

Dictators are ascendant. But democracy is still in demand.

     

Recent protests – from Hong Kong and Sudan to Central and Eastern Europe – demonstrate that large numbers of people around the world still want democracy enough to take to… Read more »

Existential threat? Iran and opposition ‘locked in lopsided confrontation’

     

At a time of rising tensions between the United States and Iran, various opposition factions within the Iran diaspora are competing to position themselves as a credible alternative to the… Read more »

Will the EU be a player or a playground? Solidarity of democratic West ‘matters as much as ever’

     

Today, the cohesion of the West matters as much as ever in the face of a newly assertive Russia and China, argues David Reynolds, professor of international history at the… Read more »