Cuba’s ‘big change’ – China-on-a-daiquiri?
Fidel’s brother [Raul Castro] has clearly been thinking ahead in a way the aging Fidelistas in the Cuban Communist Party have not, notes Alma Guillermoprieto. He may be trying… Read more »
Category: Authoritarianism
Will the ‘Trump effect’ boost world’s authoritarians?
Donald Trump’s emergence as the Republican presidential candidate has already dealt an enormous blow to the reputation of the American political system, and indeed to the reputation of democracy itself,… Read more »
Obama must raise Vietnam’s rights abuses, civil society crackdown
Thich Quang Do, the Patriarch of Vietnam’s Unified Buddhist Church (left), has called on U.S. president Barack Obama to use his forthcoming trip to the Communist state to highlight continuing… Read more »
The real purpose of China’s new anti-NGO law
China’s new anti-NGO law is evidence of a xenophobic shift in the country’s politics, an anti-foreign turn driven by several related trends, The Wall Street Journal notes: First, President Xi Jinping has… Read more »
New isolationism or a strategy for democratic renewal?
A joke in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting” goes like this, The Wall Street Journal’s Bret Stephens writes: “In Wenceslaus Square, in Prague, a guy is throwing… Read more »
Egypt faces backlash on freedom of expression
The US State Department and the European Union have urged Egypt’s government to uphold basic rights to freedom of expression after security forces stormed the Press Syndicate. Egypt’s police… Read more »
Turkey ‘at the heart of the storm’
Reporters Without Borders placed Turkey – where more than 30 journalists are currently under arrest – 151st on a list of 180 countries in its new World Press Freedom Index,… Read more »
India denies visas to Chinese dissidents
India has declined to issue visas to two Chinese activists hoping to attend a conference on promoting democracy, days after it revoked a visa for an exiled ethnic Uighur leader… Read more »
Russia’s ‘hollow men’ locked in dynamic of failure
Far from formidable, Vladimir Putin and those around him in the Kremlin have made themselves prisoners of the past, argues Andrew Wood, an associate fellow of Chatham House and a… Read more »
An ‘existential threat’ in China’s future?
More than halfway through his five-year term as president of China and general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party—expected to be the first of at least two—Xi Jinping’s widening crackdown… Read more »