Taiwan is a frontline state with experience in resisting China’s attempts to erode democracy, observers suggest. China has used various tactics to expand its influence in Taiwan and elsewhere, including… Read more »
Malaysia’s new government on Monday established a special task force to probe possible criminal offences relating to country’s 1Malaysia Development Berhad (1MDB) sovereign wealth fund, the FT reports: The task… Read more »
As Malaysia’s most powerful man, Najib Razak worked hard to keep the public from accessing information about a multi-billion dollar scandal at state fund 1MDB. Now they just might find… Read more »
A few years ago the US academic Larry Diamond declared that a “democratic recession” had set in after about 2006. The long global expansion of democracy that began with the… Read more »
The lives of Russian kleptocrats in Britain are suddenly fraught with new anxieties, the Washington Post reports: Critics in London of Russian President Vladimir Putin are reevaluating their need for… Read more »
Sanctions may help advance democratic reform, some suggest, if they are deployed to punish wayward regimes or to incentivize political change. Alongside diplomacy and aid conditionality, sanctions were a key… Read more »
The events of the past quarter-century have challenged the view that history moves inexorably in one direction. Liberal democracy is not the “end of history”—nothing is, argues William Galston, senior… Read more »
Liberal democracy is threatened by populism of both left and right, according to former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. “For the first time in my life I am anxious… Read more »
The State Department’s fiscal 2019 budget request is a proposal not only to slash the budget of the National Endowment for Democracy but also to disassemble its relationships with its core institutes,… Read more »
Surveying America’s political history, Larry Diamond of Stanford University divines “a general pattern of resilience, punctuated by dark periods of authoritarian temptation,” The Economist notes: Indeed the two are related;… Read more »