Category: Democratic institutions

Erdogan ‘taking steps to end Turkish democracy’

     

On June 17, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced as illegitimate the ongoing protest march from the Turkish capital, Ankara, to Istanbul, organized to demand justice regarding Erdogan’s media crackdown… Read more »

Sliding into civil war? Venezuela’s ‘drama threatens to turn from farce to tragedy’

     

  Venezuela’s government hunted on Wednesday for rogue policemen who attacked key installations by helicopter, but critics of President Nicolas Maduro suspected the raid may have been staged to justify… Read more »

The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

     

Zeynep Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest is a timely examination of the recent digital era of public protest. Moving through her analyses of the… Read more »

Hackers ‘Russia-proofing’ Germany’s elections

     

From imperfect voting machines to the fake news that chokes social media, the U.S., the U.K., and France are only beginning to wrestle with the ways in which democracy can… Read more »

Promoting modernized Islam to counter jihadist ideology

     

This week’s Brussels train station bombing renews the focus on the attraction and motivating power of jihadist ideology, The New York Times reports. Meanwhile, the attack on Muslim worshippers at… Read more »

UN ‘abandons democracy’ in Asia? Why governance still matters

     

Governance should be “framed in terms of how power is being exercised instead of how it is acquired,” according to the UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the… Read more »

Russian cyberattacks aimed at legitimacy of political process

     

Current and former government officials painted a sinister portrait Wednesday of Russian cyberattacks aimed at interfering in the U.S. presidential election last year, AP reports: Moscow stockpiled stolen information and selectively… Read more »

Political bots – ‘propaganda powerhouse’ threatens democracy

     

Bots airing pro-Kremlin views have flooded the Russian-language portion of the social media platform Twitter, in what researchers from the Oxford Internet Institute’s Computational Propaganda Research Project  say is an… Read more »

Liberal democracy not yet dead but crisis likely to persist

     

In his insightful and harrowing new book, Edward Luce, a columnist for The Financial Times, issues a chilling warning, Michiko Kakutani writes for The New York Times: “Western liberal democracy… Read more »