Category: Europe

Implacable Hostility: Russia’s response to Ukraine’s ‘stunning’ election

     

Russia is treating Ukraine and its newly elected president, Volodymyr Zelensky, with the same implacable hostility as it did during Petro Poroshenko’s presidency, according to a leading analyst. The Kremlin… Read more »

What foreign policy approach toward backsliding liberal democracies?

     

Hungary’s illiberal premier Viktor Orban has rewritten Hungary’s constitution and dismantled judicial checks on power, stifled a once vibrant media, forced a top university out of the country, and criminalized the activities of some human rights organizations. Meanwhile, he… Read more »

Zelenskiy’s Ukraine well-placed to influence, compete with Russia

     

Ukraine is “the single most important front of [the] war against authoritarian expansion,” according to Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama. “Clearly it matters a lot to Putin that Ukraine does not… Read more »

‘Pushing on an Open Door’: countering illiberal alliances in the Western Balkans

     

Nearly two decades after the cessation of violent conflict in the Western Balkans and efforts by the international community to support democratic reform, analysis suggests that most countries in the… Read more »

Ten options for democratic renewal

     

This week’s election result makes Spain the “most solid social-democracy in Europe” and “an example against the threat of advancing populism and the extreme right,” said one observer,  referring to… Read more »

Narratives can counter the disinformation dominating World Press Freedom Day

     

“Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it,”  said the celebrated satirist Jonathan Swift. A rising tide of fake news and disinformation is dominating World Press Freedom Day discussions taking… Read more »

Balkans split between East and West (but still room for engagement)

     

With the exception of Kosovo (53 percent), respondents from Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), North Macedonia or Serbia generally do not feel that they belong definitively to either West or East, according to a new poll by the… Read more »

‘Information ops kill chain’ can stop disinformation drowning democracy

     

  Is disinformation drowning democracy? Former privacy tsars and technology experts have warned the major political parties they must dramatically strengthen their cybersecurity to protect the growing mountains of private… Read more »

Will China drive a wedge between transatlantic democracies?

     

The next round of U.S.-China great power competition is poised to extend beyond the economic and military domains, morphing into an ideological competition between American free market democratic capitalism and… Read more »

Debunking ‘enduring myth’ that EU’s eastern member states less favorable to democratic values

     

A new analysis challenges the “enduring myth” that the European Union’s eastern member states are less favorable to the democratic values set out in Article Two of the Treaties of… Read more »