Category: Dictatorships

Supporting internationalism in a dangerous world

     

The alternatives to U.S. leadership are few, according to former senators Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who jointly worked on the American Internationalism Project, an impressive bipartisan undertaking… Read more »

Forces of change coming to Iran?

     

  Iran‘s president has called on the committee vetting candidates for next month’s parliamentary elections to allow more reformists to stand. In a televised speech, Hassan Rouhani said parliament was… Read more »

The revenge of history: authoritarian narratives

     

Some 25 years after the Cold War, passions grounded in history are increasingly an essential feature of international relations, and dangerously so, argues Bruno Tertrais, a Senior Research Fellow at… Read more »

Civil resistance in the Arab Spring: what went wrong?

     

The overriding lesson of the abortive Arab Spring is that getting rid of a dictatorial and corrupt ruler is not enough. Building democratic institutions, and restoring confidence in a flawed… Read more »

How the West’s normativists misjudged Russia

     

The expert community both in the West and Russia is retracing the steps that Sovietologists made in the 1980s, when they turned out to be completely unprepared for the disintegration… Read more »

China’s leaders reveal their fears

     

Once admired by authoritarian governments elsewhere, not to mention some commentators in the West, for its canny balancing of free markets and party control, China’s style of leadership may be… Read more »

Russia and China seek new ‘client states’?

     

U.S. President Barack Obama raised eyebrows around the world with a difficult-to-interpret reference to Ukraine in his final annual State of the Union address that lumped the post-Soviet state and… Read more »

China steps up crackdown on civil society, rights advocates

     

Chinese authorities have formally arrested China‘s most prominent woman human rights lawyer, Wang Yu, accusing her of subversion, as part of a crackdown on activists who have helped people fight… Read more »

Cuba: still condemned to silence

     

Dissident artists are no better off post-Fidel, and renewed relations with the US haven’t helped as many hoped or claimed they would, Ryan McChrystal writes for Index on Censorship: The… Read more »

Exporting the Chinese Model?

     

  As 2016 begins, an historic contest is underway, largely hidden from public view, over competing Chinese and Western strategies to promote economic growth, notes Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow… Read more »