Thailand on Wednesday barred entry to a Hong Kong student activist who helped organize pro-democracy protests in the Chinese-ruled city in 2014, with a Thai newspaper saying he had been… Read more »
A new global “soft power” ranking recently reported that the democratic states of North America and Western Europe were the most successful at achieving their diplomatic objectives “through attraction and… Read more »
North Korea’s neighbors, the Chinese, have never expected the DPRK to surrender or collapse, and so far they have been correct, notes Columbia University’s Andrew J. Nathan. At home, the… Read more »
The world has experienced a decade of decline in democracy, and the downward trajectory is accelerating, Freedom House reports: Nativist sentiments in the United States and Europe are weakening support… Read more »
Three student leaders in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, who led mass rallies and sit-ins in 2014, have been sentenced, the BBC reports: Joshua Wong, who became the teenage face… Read more »
Tens of thousands of people gathered in a Hong Kong park on Saturday evening to do what people across the border in mainland China could not: commemorate the anniversary of… Read more »
The nightmare of the Cultural Revolution continues to disturb the dream of Chinese democracy, The Economist notes: The violence of the Cultural Revolution, and the many officials it claimed… Read more »
Filipino voters backed Rodrigo “the Punisher” Duterte more to sock it to elites than to reinstall authoritarianism. This kind of bet is becoming increasingly attractive to electorates around the world…. Read more »
The authoritarian backlash in the Middle East, with the Arab Winter following the Arab Spring, is part of the… Read more »
Seymour Martin Lipset famously argued that economic development would enlarge the middle class, and that the middle class would demand democracy. Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of… Read more »