Category: Authoritarianism

Remembering Liu Xiaobo: China’s strategy ‘born of weakness’

     

China is caught in a set of interlocking problems, notes STRATFOR analyst George Friedman: Its economic miracle has matured into more normal growth rates. It has a vast population that… Read more »

Dissident Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo dies – his legacy lives

     

Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo, a prominent dissident since the 1989 Tiananmen Square pro-democracy protests, has died after being denied permission to leave the country for treatment for… Read more »

Cyberwarfare takes a new turn: China joins Russia’s ‘geoinformational struggle’ against West

     

  The recent “ransomware” attacks masked a greater cyber-issue: chaos and disruption on the Internet as the new normal, according to analysts Brandon Valeriano, Ryan C. Maness and Benjamin Jensen…. Read more »

Kremlin disinformation: dismiss, distort, distract, and dismay – at home and abroad

     

While Russia is employing active measures and perpetuating disinformation abroad, it is also using allegations of fake news to silence domestic critics and analysts who query the official ideological narrative…. Read more »

A new era of competition: democrats vs. autocrats – and illiberals

     

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that democracies long failed to realize that a new era of competition was underway between autocratic and democratic states, notes Christopher Walker,… Read more »

Russia shifts from soft power to hard-line

     

A new — and likely more aggressive — chapter in Russian diplomacy is about to begin in Washington with the departure of Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak, whose soft-power approach to… Read more »

Problem in rooting foreign policy in Western values

     

Invoking the roots of Western civilization, President Trump’s Poland speech recalled the core values undergirding modern democracy, some observers contend. “Western” values are universal values, and Trump affirmed their universality… Read more »

Cuba’s transition will be shaped more by internal factors than external actors

     

In the wake of the new EU-Cuba deal, European Parliamentarians have urged Havana to respect human rights and Brussels confirms that the mutual deal could be cancelled if the Communist… Read more »

Alliance for Securing Democracy will counter information warfare

     

A bipartisan roster of former senior national security officials have signed onto a new initiative – the Alliance for Securing Democracy – to track and ultimately counter Russian political meddling,… Read more »

Ukrainian civil society ‘gearing up’ to counter patronalistic regime?

     

The appointment of former U.S. ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker (right) to be special representative to Ukraine could breathe some much-needed life back into the drive for peace, whose momentum… Read more »