Category: Democratic institutions

Resilience the key to winning normative war with Russia

     

Is Russia succeeding in destroying American democracy, as one Washington Post columnist suggests? Much of the global conversation around “fake news” has centered on the United States. Yet it increasingly… Read more »

How Democracy Ends – ‘in its sleep’?

     

Central Europe is going backwards, with populism, nationalism and “illiberal democracy” on the rise. That is the consensus among many opinion leaders in Western Europe and North America, notes CEPA’s… Read more »

Sub-Saharan Africa’s diverging democratization trends

     

The last decade has seen the standing of democracy in Africa improve, argues Natasha Ezrow, a senior lecturer at the University of Essex. In the early 1980s, only five countries… Read more »

Impatient dictators: ‘How to Rig an Election’

     

Authoritarian states are using all-too familiar constitutional mechanisms to consolidate power, according to activist-journalists Tamara Grigoryeva and Ismail Djalilov. Across Eurasia, snap elections happen rather frequently, they write for Open… Read more »

To ‘mature as a democracy’, Malaysia’s ‘sick-minded’ corruption must end

     

Malaysia’s new government on Monday established a special task force to probe possible criminal offences relating to country’s 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund, the FT reports: The task… Read more »

Armenia needs ‘institutional backbone’ to sustain democratic breakthrough

     

Converting Armenia ’s ‘Velvet Revolution’ into a sustainable democratic transition requires establishing an  “’institutional backbone” to ensure there is no reversion to corrupt, autocratic governance, says Daron Acemoglu, a Turkish born… Read more »

Gaza: Hamas’s social warfare strategy in action

     

  Palestinian protests on the Gaza-Israel border have dropped off over the past two days, with Israel on Wednesday pointing to what it said were Egyptian efforts to restore calm… Read more »

Populism replacing sectarianism as defining force in Iraqi politics?

     

  In all the turmoil of the Middle East, the most significant development of the year thus far may be the democratic election Iraq held on Saturday. It was competitive,… Read more »