Category: Democratic institutions

China’s sharp power: is talk of new ideological Cold War ‘overblown’?

     

China’s media is being wielded as a tool to shape public opinion and serve the ideological aims of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across the globe. And, as a part… Read more »

Reclamation: new Arab discourse empowers civil actors

     

ISIS may be defeated and devoid of territory, but its ideology continues to spread, The [London] Times reports. Jihadi fighters are not necessarily driven by religious ideology, disenfranchised or lacking… Read more »

Why Democracy Is So Hard to Build

     

Today’s pessimism about democracy is both historically unwarranted and self-defeating; it undermines the optimism necessary to sustain the struggle ahead, argues Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard… Read more »

How Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating democracies

     

When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist values—and lost, argues analyst Franklin Foer. The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from… Read more »

Democracies need ‘new capabilities’ to counter information warfare

     

Democracies need to develop “new capabilities” to counter authoritarians’ information warfare, says a senior U.S. official. “We need to give renewed emphasis to the information environment,” said Andrew Knaggs, deputy… Read more »

Venezuelan opposition ‘testing military’s loyalty’

     

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today demanded Venezuela reopen a bridge on the Colombian border for an aid shipment organised by the opposition, the BBC reports: Venezuelan soldiers have… Read more »

Polarization a key factor in democracy’s ‘alarming’ decline

     

The latest Freedom in the World report – compiled by more than 100 experts and drawing on data from 209 countries – describes an “ominous” global erosion of democratic values… Read more »

Democracy & the Illiberal Temptation

     

The world offers more lessons about how democracies grow weak and brittle than how they can be revived, but it should at least be possible to figure out a systematic… Read more »

How to renew trust in democracy

     

How to restore trust in democracy and the media that serve it and us? More specifically, what can leaders, media and citizens do to better understand the “other,” to distinguish… Read more »