Seeing democratization after the Cold War as a troubled process of political imitation helps us understand three critical ways in which an unjustifiable over-idealization of capitalism and democracy helped bring… Read more »
The Kremlin ‘hired a network of Britons to go after enemies of Putin,’ The Guardian reports. Who will rule Russia when Vladimir Putin is gone? The Russian president recently reignited… Read more »
A leading German university has been plunged into scandal after it emerged that it had signed a contract binding it to abide by Chinese law while accepting hundreds of thousands… Read more »
Any renewal of democracy requires political institutions to be “as inclusive as possible” through a reassertion of “democratic pluralism,” argues Michael Lind, author of The New Class War: Saving Democracy… Read more »
Mikhail Mishustin, Russia’s new prime minister, made his reputation collecting money for Vladimir Putin. His next challenge will be working out ways to spend it, The Financial Times reports… Read more »
The “politics of imitation” is a phrase that recurs innumerable times in The Light That Failed: Why the West Is Losing the Fight for Democracy by Ivan Krastev (above) and Stephen Holmes,… Read more »
….or will algorithms someday be used to optimize the ballot box, The Economist asks in a must-read long essay: @TheEconomist When it comes to eroding an existing democracy, rather than… Read more »
Chinese authorities are knitting together old and state-of-the-art technologies — phone scanners, facial-recognition cameras, face and fingerprint databases and many others — into sweeping tools for authoritarian control, according to police and private… Read more »
Viewed from today’s perspective, it seems clear that liberalism and nationalism are enemies. But that was not always the case. As recently as 1989, liberalism and nationalism were allies in… Read more »
There’s has been extensive and ongoing debate about “what went wrong in Central and Eastern Europe” and what explains its various forms of illiberalism and democratic decline. A variety of,… Read more »