Russia dreams of Turkey pivoting to ‘authoritarian international’

     

Turkey on Tuesday warned of rising anti-American sentiment and risks to a migrant deal with the European Union, ramping up the rhetoric in the face of Western alarm over the… Read more »

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Post-Soviet Eurasia: What’s Gone Wrong?

     

After a quarter-century, the 1991 breakup of the Soviet Union looks like a de-democratizing event. Leading up to that fateful year, Mikhail Gorbachev had been one of the world’s great… Read more »

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A case for electoral reform

     

  There is an electoral system that improves upon the Anglo-American first-past-the-post (FPP) or plurality method of election, at least in surfacing second and third (and lower-order) preferences, argues Donald… Read more »

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‘Appropriate assistance’ to Ukraine could be vulnerable?

     

The Russian-backed president of a separatist region in Ukraine was wounded on Saturday in an assassination attempt, highlighting rising violence in the country’s east, The New York Times reports (HT:… Read more »

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Global democratic recession – for now

     

The politicians who captured the spirit of the early 1990s were inspirational democrats such as South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia — and liberal reformers such as Mikhail… Read more »

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Failed coup promotes Erdogan’s ‘narrative of an Islamist defense of democracy’

     

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has always had ambitions of surpassing Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, as the country’s most consequential figure. Now, a failed coup may allow… Read more »

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China’s sham show trials ‘like a theater of the absurd’

     

Human rights groups and observers say China’s latest wave of “sham trials” against legal advocates, arrested amid an orchestrated crackdown last July, is mostly a political charade, and to some… Read more »

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