Category: Democratic Transitions

Why has ‘pivot’ to Asia had underwhelming results?

     

Throughout much of the 1990s and the early 2000s, Southeast Asia was one of the brightest spots for democracy globally. Since the late 2000s, however, the region’s democratization has stalled;… Read more »

Democratization a ‘key focus for Obama’s final year’

     

President Obama will seek to consolidate his ­foreign-policy legacy this year by traveling widely and working with allies to combat extremism and foster the rise of emerging democracies, said deputy… Read more »

Lessons for Syria, learned in Libya

     

Critics are frustrated by the Obama administration’s Syria policy, attacking him for indecisiveness or lack of will to defeat Assad, but President Barack Obama seems to have learned from the… Read more »

‘Doubling down’ on democracy in face of new authoritarians?

     

Western liberal democracy now faces a competitor Frances Fukuyama did not anticipate when he wrote “The End of History?,” says Harvard’s Michael Ignatieff: states that are capitalist in economics, authoritarian… Read more »

Does Democracy Matter?

     

  Negative experiences from state-building projects in Iraq and Afghanistan, the mixed record of democratic change in the former Soviet Union and the aftermath of Arab Spring have led many… Read more »

Time for realism on building new democracies?

     

What has gone wrong with the dream of democracy’s transformational potential? What stands out is a generalized disillusionment with the ability of democracy to provide public goods, the key functions… Read more »

Democracy ‘losing the global battle of ideas’?

     

The tide of global democratic change, which at the start of the new millennium looked like an unstoppable force of nature, has been turned back over the last decade. How… Read more »