Category: coronavirus

Democracy ‘waking from Covid-19 hibernation’ or ‘dangers much greater than opportunities’?

     

“Overall, the dangers are much greater than the opportunities” in terms of the pandemic’s impact on liberty and democracy, says Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama. “I do think there are opportunities… Read more »

Chris Patten urges investigation into coronavirus origins

     

Britain’s last colonial governor of Hong Kong, Chris Patten, has asked the British government to watch out for Chinese attempts to interfere with the city’s affairs while the world grapples… Read more »

Democracies vulnerable to crisis: Covid exacerbates weaknesses, says BTI

     

The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the very weaknesses that have marked the democratic erosion of the last decade in most of the 137 developing and transformation countries examined in the… Read more »

How China exploits the pandemic it helped cause

     

The coronavirus pandemic that rages across the globe is a fire China helped light. The Chinese government spent weeks denying and downplaying the severity of its growing coronavirus outbreak – obfuscation cost nations… Read more »

Is partisanship driving pandemic polarization?

     

Reuters Institute analyst J. Scott Brennen draws on sample of 225 pieces of misinformation rated false or misleading by fact-checkers, drawn from a collection maintained by First Draft, to explain… Read more »

COVID-19’s regime-type fallacy: Autocrats also feeling strain

     

The novel coronavirus is compounding preexisting threats to press freedoms around the world, according to a new report by the international watchdog organization Reporters Without Borders, ABC News reports: Reporters… Read more »

A post-pandemic democratic renaissance?

     

  As leading authoritarian states exploit that Covid-19 pandemic to pursue a strategy of “co-option, coercion, and concealment,” as H.R. McMaster has summarized it, the old liberal order may rapidly… Read more »

China’s ‘hub and spoke strategy’: COVID-19 geopolitical turning point?

     

COVID-19 signals a global paradigm shift because even before the pandemic, the world was already in the grips of a far-reaching transformation, analyst Ullrich Fichtner writes for Der Spiegel. The… Read more »

‘Beginning of the end’ for Hong Kong? Two systems ‘dead as a Dodo’

     

Hong Kong activists are planning to take advantage of forthcoming opportunities to counter the recent crackdown on the pro-democracy movement. “We’re only at half-time in the match,” one activist suggested…. Read more »

Reclaiming Democracy: COVID-19 and the Liberal Future

     

Just over a year ago, opposition candidates won the mayoralties of İstanbul, Ankara, and nine other cities across Turkey in a striking political upset for President Erdoğan, notes the Project… Read more »