Category: Eurasia

Georgia’s civil society must seize the opportunity of electoral reform

     

A new front has been opened in Georgia’s ‘Battle of the political airwaves’ with the announcement that a new channel, Formula, will be broadcast from October. One of the financiers… Read more »

Labor mourns loss of democracy advocates

     

Labor unions are often a country’s largest, most representative civil society groups, with a membership base that adds democratic credentials and legitimacy that most NGOs can only envy. Public approval… Read more »

Moscow in Movement: Record protests present new challenge to Putin’s dominance

     

An estimated fifty thousand people in Moscow (Moscow Times/CFR) protested the barring of independent candidates from the ballot in an upcoming local election in what was one of the country’s… Read more »

Kremlin under siege: after 20 years in power, Putin ‘looks weaker than ever’

     

Twenty years ago, Vladimir Putin appeared on the political Olympus in the guise of an effective bureaucrat with a security services background; a market-oriented statesman and pragmatist without ideological pretenses,… Read more »

When protest is not enough: Movements need alternative vision to the status quo

     

Recent political protests, from Hong Kong to Moscow, Tbilisi to Belgrade, have been the biggest since 1989, the great year of pro-democracy revolutions. But something fundamental has changed in the… Read more »

Revisionists pose ‘civilizational challenge’ to Western liberal democratic order

     

  The resurgence of threats to liberal democracy — external and internal — does not refute the principal thesis of Francis Fukuyama’s “The End of History?” says a prominent analyst…. Read more »

Is Russia’s ‘new civic activism’ testing Putin’s grip on power?

     

  More people in Russia view the late Brezhnev era of the Soviet Union as “close to the people” than they do President Vladimir Putin’s Russia, according to a survey… Read more »

‘Never-ending state war against civil society’ meets the new face of Russia’s protests

     

Russian authorities have threatened protesters in Moscow with lengthy jail sentences in an attempt to dampen an unexpected surge in protest mood before a planned opposition rally, The Guardian reports…. Read more »