Category: Democracy Assistance and Promotion

China: TV Trials ‘Signal New Phase in Attack on Rights’

     

Chinese lawyers and rights activists appeared in televised trials throughout this week in what seemed to be a new, more public phase of President Xi Jinping’s campaign to cleanse the… Read more »

Venezuela – ‘a nation with no future’?

     

About 20 percent of Venezuela’s children face problems of malnutrition, and the number of children admitted to hospitals for severe malnutrition has spiked, The Miami Herald reports: A survey carried… Read more »

Zhou Shifeng sentence highlights China’s crackdown on dissent

     

  A court in China jailed a prominent human rights lawyer for seven years on Thursday for subverting the government, state media said, the latest in a string of convictions… Read more »

Kremlin ‘making forays into field of democracy assistance’

     

The hack of the U.S. Democratic National Committee emails, now widely attributed to Russian intelligence, has set off a political earthquake in the United States, notes Eugene Rumer, a former… Read more »

Post-putsch Turkish democracy still vulnerable

     

In a dispute between NATO allies, Turkey is demanding that the United States extradite Fethullah Gulen (left), a Pennsylvania-based Turkish cleric, to face charges of engineering a coup attempt. But… Read more »

No nationalism, no democracy?

     

Marc F. Plattner, founding coeditor of the Journal of Democracy and co-chair of the Research Council of the International Forum for Democratic Studies, addressed the delicate relationship between nationalism and… Read more »

Challenging myths about post-Maidan Ukraine

     

During the ongoing turmoil in Ukraine, many observers have commented on strains of nationalism, xenophobia, racism, and anti-Semitism in the country, notes Taras Kuzio, author of “Ukraine. Democratization, Corruption and… Read more »

‘Orderism’ – The New Ideology of the New Cold War?

     

In its heyday, Communism claimed that capitalism had betrayed the worker. So what should we make of Moscow’s new battle cry, that democracy has betrayed the voter? analyst Jochen Bittner… Read more »

Promises made, promises broken? Russia and the West

     

The West does not need to back down from its view that the inclusion of Central and Eastern Europe into NATO and the EU promoted strategic interests and values, notes… Read more »