Category: Authoritarianism

Iran’s ‘mythical moderate’: Rafsanjani blended economic liberalism, political authoritarianism

     

Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (above, left) , who has died aged 82, was one of the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran; a shrewd politician who many Iranians saw as… Read more »

Democracies in a new global competition of ideas

     

Moscow has made information and asymmetrical warfare central to its foreign and military policy, analyst Fareed Zakaria writes for The Washington Post: The idea of information warfare is not new…. Read more »

Why the West is failing to counter Kremlin disinformation

     

Ten years ago, in the wake of the murder of the leading Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (left), a popular comedian-turned-blogger in Italy named Beppe Grillo urged tens of thousands of… Read more »

Perfect Dictatorship? China‘s “controlocracy” stifles NGOs

     

Authorities in China’s capital have cut off the utilities and destroyed the central heating system of a prominent non-government organization (NGO) set up to help migrant workers, as a new… Read more »

Why US-Russia spat is not a return to the cold war

     

After the cold war ended, the competition in ideas stopped, notes Peter Pomerantsev, author of ‘Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.’ There was only one democratic capitalist model out… Read more »

How Putin does it: well-trained in ideological warfare

     

Cold War notions of “fake news” and “Soviet-style propaganda” are back in style, except now people say them about shiny new concepts such as cyberattacks and WikiLeaks. Whether or not… Read more »

China’s censorship reaches Washington, D.C.

     

Miss World pageant authorities have refused to allow Ms. Anastasia Lin to attend the American premiere of her own film, The Bleeding Edge. She “has been barred from speaking to the news… Read more »