Category: Dictatorships

Defending Digital Democracy via Election Cybersecurity Scorecard

     

More than 120 state and local election officials, communications directors, IT managers, and secretaries of state ran drills simulating security catastrophes that could happen on the worst Election Day imaginable,… Read more »

Blunting the hard edge of China’s ‘Sharp Power’

     

Faculty members at Cornell University said on Monday that they were cutting ties with a leading Chinese university after reports that it was harassing and intimidating students leading a campaign… Read more »

Latin America braced for ‘Bolsonaro effect.’ How did the unthinkable happen?

     

Following the crushing victory of right-wing candidate Jair Bolsonaro in Sunday’s runoff presidential election, Brazil’s Latin American neighbors are bracing for a regional “Bolsonaro effect,” AFP reports: The knock-on effect… Read more »

Putin’s Russia: emergence of democratic alternative an unlikely scenario?

     

Authoritarian rule is not imposed on Russians from above but is solicited from below by the people themselves, claims Sergey Karaganov, a former Putin advisor and one of Russia’s leading… Read more »

Artificial intelligence: enabling authoritarians, jeopardizing democracy

     

At a moment of great anxiety about the state of modern liberal democracy,  artificial intelligence in China appears to be an incredibly powerful enabler of authoritarian rule. Is the arc… Read more »

Arab world needs democracy, not ‘liberalizing autocrats’

     

In April Jamal Khashoggi gave a speech, saying the dangerous idea of the benevolent autocrat, the just dictator, is being revived in the Arab world, notes The New York Times…. Read more »

The Right to Memory: ‘excessive demonization’ of dictator?

     

Historians say millions of Soviet citizens were executed, died in labor camps or were starved to death under Josef Stalin’s dictatorship. But Russian President Vladimir Putin has said that “excessive… Read more »

Dealing with dictators: U.S. needs new approach

     

The disappearance of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi has precipitated a new crisis in U.S.-Saudi relations. Yet that crisis has also revived a much older dilemma in American strategy: How to… Read more »

Saudi dissident’s murder roils Washington think-tanks

     

The murder of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi is causing ructions within the think-tank community. As prominent investors, media organizations, and even lobbyists have begun to pull back from involvement in… Read more »