Category: Democratization

Do Southeast Asia elections signal a consolidation of illiberal rule?

     

  Since the fall of the Indonesian dictator Suharto in 1998, civil society has flourished under the country’s burgeoning democracy. Observers even began calling Indonesia the most democratic nation in… Read more »

Ethiopia’s Abyssinian spring enters a critical phase

     

Ethiopian Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed took office amid profound strife, and he won the Nobel Peace Prize just seven months before the country’s elections. The timing isn’t necessarily good. The… Read more »

Lessons for Sudan from Nigeria’s ‘militarized democratic experiment’?

     

Africa’s latest emerging democracy, Sudan, deserves the benefit of Nigeria’s experience, its civilian opposition having recently signed a pact of diarchy — supposedly transitional — with the military, argues Nigerian author… Read more »

Burma’s civil society challenged by ‘misleading top-down transition’

     

How did Burma’s civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi go from Nobel Peace Prize laureate to figurehead for a regime accused of genocide? After Myanmar’s political reforms in 2011, Western… Read more »

Fulfilling the promise of 1989: Time for a second liberation of ‘profound renewal’

     

On the tenth anniversary of 1989, at the brink of the millennium, we could celebrate both the original triumph of the velvet revolutions and great subsequent progress. By the twentieth… Read more »

Great power competition in MENA follows ‘ineffectual’ democracy promotion?

     

Over the last few years, a crisis of legitimacy has beset the liberal international order. In the context of global reassessment, the configuration of regional orders has come into question,… Read more »

New sanctions target Cubazuela links

     

The United States hit Venezuela with a new round of sanctions on Tuesday, targeting the crisis-battered country’s ties with Cuba, which supports Nicolas Maduro in Caracas, AFP reports: The move… Read more »

Resilient authoritarians: Are dictatorships better than democracies…..

     

…….at fighting climate change? Asian environmentalists as well as self-serving autocrats make the argument that a crisis as severe (if man-made) as rising temperatures can be mitigated only by the… Read more »

Disinformation: Countering malign influence of autocrats – and Big Tech?

     

The European Union may need “broader rules to make sure that the way companies collect and use data doesn’t harm the fundamental values of our society,” tech czar Margrethe Vestager,… Read more »

Rethinking backsliding: Why flawed liberals leave democracy vulnerable

     

One thing is especially disconcerting about the illiberal turn in Eastern and Central Europe. It has been the early front-runners of democratization – Hungary and Poland – where democratic backsliding… Read more »