China’s sharp power: is talk of new ideological Cold War ‘overblown’?
China’s media is being wielded as a tool to shape public opinion and serve the ideological aims of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) across the globe. And, as a part… Read more »
Cuba’s new constitution: window-dressing for single-party rule?
Cuba’s revised constitution amounts to window-dressing for continued single-party rule, some of the island’s democratic and civil society voices will tell a Washington forum next week. An Organization of American… Read more »
Reclamation: new Arab discourse empowers civil actors
ISIS may be defeated and devoid of territory, but its ideology continues to spread, The [London] Times reports. Jihadi fighters are not necessarily driven by religious ideology, disenfranchised or lacking… Read more »
Why Democracy Is So Hard to Build
Today’s pessimism about democracy is both historically unwarranted and self-defeating; it undermines the optimism necessary to sustain the struggle ahead, argues Sheri Berman, a professor of political science at Barnard… Read more »
How Russian-style kleptocracy is infiltrating democracies
When the U.S.S.R. collapsed, Washington bet on the global spread of democratic capitalist values—and lost, argues analyst Franklin Foer. The looting elites of the former Soviet Union were far from… Read more »
From ‘Death to the Shah’ to ‘Death to the Dictator’: Iran’s revolution turns 40
Next week, the Islamic Republic of Iran will mark the 40th anniversary of the popular overthrow of its pro-Western monarch, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, the Atlantic Council writes. Iran will be… Read more »
RIP or resurgence for liberal democratic order?
The alarmists have a point. The Liberal International Order (LIO) has many enemies. One is populism, the insurgency against the institutions of representative democracy, flanked by the revolt against fourth… Read more »
Democracies need ‘new capabilities’ to counter information warfare
Democracies need to develop “new capabilities” to counter authoritarians’ information warfare, says a senior U.S. official. “We need to give renewed emphasis to the information environment,” said Andrew Knaggs, deputy… Read more »
Venezuelan opposition ‘testing military’s loyalty’
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo today demanded Venezuela reopen a bridge on the Colombian border for an aid shipment organised by the opposition, the BBC reports: Venezuelan soldiers have… Read more »
China ‘trying to take the world hostage’?
Discussions of what China’s rise will mean for the world often take on an abstract, impersonal quality, notes Hal Brands, the Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School… Read more »