Category: Authoritarianism

Approaching a tipping point? Venezuela seizes GM plant as protests swell

     

  General Motors said on Thursday that the Venezuelan authorities had seized its vehicle assembly plant in the country, adding to the chaos in the already-struggling auto industry there, The… Read more »

Putin-controlled think-tank crafting information warfare: UK election next?

     

A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin is responsible for crafting the Kremlin’s information warfare against Western democracies, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters. Two… Read more »

Poll shows radical Islamization challenging Indonesia’s democracy

     

The Christian governor of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital, lost a bitterly contested race on Wednesday that was widely seen as a test of religious and ethnic tolerance in the world’s… Read more »

What the beginning of the end of democracy looks like

     

The United States has been the modern world’s most influential country and has promoted democracy passively by serving as a model and actively through its diplomatic efforts, aid, and even military and covert action… Read more »

Democratic backsliding: the perils of polarization

     

If democratic backsliding were to occur in the United States, it would not take the form of a coup d’état; there would be no declaration of martial law or imposition of single-party rule,… Read more »

To defend liberal order, democracy’s champions must act with more conviction

     

It has been another bad week for liberal democracy, the Brookings Institution’s William A. Galston (left) writes for the Wall Street Journal: In France a late surge by Jean-Luc Mélenchon… Read more »

Can populism help invigorate liberal democracy?

     

Although the revolutions of 1989 seemed to promise a new “post-ideological” era of liberal-democratic ascendancy, we have long been caught in a powerful authoritarian undertow that often goes by the… Read more »

Putin’s ‘formidable influence machine’ at work in French poll

     

Russia, or at least its state-controlled news media, has been interfering in the French presidential election, the New York Times reports: Cécile Vaissié, a professor of Russian, Soviet and post-Soviet… Read more »

Crimintern: How the Kremlin uses Russia’s criminal networks

     

Over the past 20 years, the role of Russian-based organised crime (RBOC) in Europe has shifted considerably, notes Mark Galeotti, senior research fellow at the Institute of International Relations Prague… Read more »