Breaking out of the democratic slump
Who knew at the time of Ronald Reagan’s Westminster Address that communism would follow leg-warmers and New Coke into the dustbin of history? Under Secretary of State Uzra Zeya told… Read more »
History at a turning point: Who is Putin fighting in Ukraine?
Volodymyr Zelenskiy has inspired Ukrainians and won global respect and praise for his courage and defiance in resisting Russia’s devastating invasion of his country, Reuters reports. Refusing to leave Ukraine’s capital… Read more »
Ukraine’s ‘existential threat’ to authoritarian kleptocracy
“A successful democratic experiment in Ukraine presents an existential threat to Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian kleptocracy in Russia,” says detained opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza. It’s his strong conviction that Russia, one… Read more »
West’s democratic deficit prompts concern
Citizens are seriously concerned about the state of democracy in their home countries, yet continue to back democracy in principle and support actions to defend democracy abroad, specifically in Ukraine,… Read more »
Democratic outlier India’s ‘last best chance’
When it comes to the war in Ukraine, India is something of an outlier among the world’s democracies, notes Lisa Curtis, Director of the Indo-Pacific Security Program at the Center… Read more »
Winning the Web: Is China ‘miles ahead’ in global race for influence?
Authorities across China are tightening security and ramping up surveillance of dissidents ahead of the Tiananmen massacre anniversary, Radio Free Asia’s Gao Feng reports. Ten years after the death of… Read more »
Blinken calls China ‘most serious long-term’ threat to world order, universal values
Secretary of State Antony Blinken on Thursday outlined competing visions for the future of the international community: one centered around China’s increasingly aggressive and expansive authoritarian one-party state, and… Read more »
Open Technology Fund can counter digital authoritarianism, says new report
A new ASPI report demonstrates that in the early days of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, social media posts by Chinese diplomats on US-owned platforms almost exclusively blamed the US, NATO and the… Read more »
Ukraine’s resilient civil society bridging the humanitarian gap
On April 5, at lunchtime, 43-year-old Eliot Higgins, founder of the independent Bellingcat group of online investigators, was in the middle of “geolocating” an appalling video of Russian atrocities… Read more »
Liberal democracies ‘playing defense’?
“My defense of democracy,” writes Stein Ringen, author of How Democracies Live, “grows out of a conviction that if we and our children cannot live under reasonably well-functioning democratic rule,… Read more »