Challenging Moldova’s pro-Western facade
An unknown assailant threw a grenade at the house of the governor of Moldova’s central bank overnight, RFE/RL reports: Bank chief Dorin Dragutanu and his family were asleep when the… Read more »
Search Results for: Civil Society
Egypt’s transition wasn’t doomed to fail
The fifth anniversary of Egypt‘s 2011 uprising has produced an oddly structuralist set of reflections in which the failure of its democratic transition has taken on an almost foreordained quality, notes… Read more »
Vietnam must end ‘thuggish’ repression, says rights group
Despite renewed economic growth and progress on a number of social indicators in 2015, the government of Vietnam continued to crack down on independent writers, bloggers, and rights activists deemed… Read more »
Why social media made but couldn’t save the Arab Spring
Five years ago this week, massive protests toppled Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, marking the height of the Arab Spring. Empowered by access to social media sites like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook,… Read more »
Deriding support for democracy is counterproductive
It has become fashionable in some circles to pooh-pooh support for democracy, but Tunisia provides the Arab Spring’s “one encouraging success story”, even if its success is fragile, its economy… Read more »
Algeria: transition on hold
While Algeria escaped the worst excesses of the Arab uprisings, the multiple challenges that it has confronted in the past five years since those events remain unchanged, notes John P…. 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 »
The public sphere’s new enemies
All around the world, it seems, the walls are closing in on the space that people need to assemble, associate, express themselves freely, and register dissent, notes Chris Stone, president… Read more »
Ukraine: the good, the bad, the irreversible
Ordinary Ukrainians, Euromaidan activists and military veterans are despondent at the complete lack of progress in the fight against high-level corruption and the dominance of Ukraine’s oligarchs, says a… Read more »
Imran Khan’s threat to Pakistan’s democracy
The month-long dharnas (sit-in) in the nerve centre of Pakistan’s federal capital can easily be described as the ‘Disneyland of Pakistani dystopia,’ notes a prominent observer. Shocking is the fact… Read more »