Category: Civil Society

Fighting North Korea’s dictatorship – with flash drives

     

If you have a flash drive or SD card that’s just gathering dust somewhere, New York-based Human Rights Foundation and Silicon Valley’s Forum280, are calling on you to donate them to their… Read more »

Why it’s wrong to say the Arab Spring failed

     

  Simply dismissing the uprisings [of the Arab Spring] as a failure does not capture how fully they have transformed every dimension of the region’s politics, argues Marc Lynch, a… Read more »

Authoritarianism Goes Global

     

A new global competition in “soft power” is underway between democracy and autocracy, but only one side seems to be competing seriously, according to Christopher Walker, Marc F. Plattner and Larry Diamond,… Read more »

Let Cubans decide

     

  Members of the Christian Liberation (MCL) and the project Movement Cuba Decides delivered Thursday to the National Assembly over 10,000 signatures of citizens requesting a plebiscite for Cubans to decide on the… Read more »

Is Democracy in Decline?

     

For all the commentary on democratic recession, there has been nothing like the kind of “reverse wave” that Samuel P. Huntington’s The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century… Read more »

Obama carpets ‘stone-faced’ Castro

     

Cuba’s Communist regime should tolerate dissent, criticism and even protests, President Barack Obama told its leaders, in a powerful speech, televised across the island, in which he outlined the benefits… Read more »

Engage civil society in party-building to consolidate democracy

     

Criticizing U.S. missteps in promoting democracy is certainly reasonable—particularly in light of the debacles in Iraq and Libya—but elevating these criticisms into high doctrine and principled critiques of democracy promotion… Read more »

Egypt’s civil society crackdown: rights defenders at risk of prosecution

     

Fourteen global human rights groups today urged Egypt to halt a renewed crackdown on civil society and rights defenders. The demand came as President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi announced a cabinet… Read more »

China’s ruling party ‘struggles for a new normal’

     

Two remarkable documents emerged from China last week, notes ChinaFile: the first is the essay “A Thousand Yes-Men Cannot Equal One Honest Advisor”—available here in Chinese and translated here into English—which appeared on the website… Read more »