Hybrid Putinism: ‘a mafia state with a totalitarian society’?
The question of what constitutes democracy did not have time to be hashed out in the Russian public sphere before that sphere began disappearing a decade and a half ago,… Read more »
Search Results for: democratic values
Populism and protest: is Poland a harbinger?
The 2015 victory of Poland’s Law and Justice (PiS) party is an example of the rise of contemporary authoritarian populism, say analysts Joanna Fomina and Jacek Kucharczyk. The PiS’s rise… Read more »
Autocrats using ‘toxic election’ to pour scorn on democracy
Russia, China and Iran are among several authoritarian regimes seeking to use the U.S. election as an opportunity to project soft power, to undermine the attractiveness of liberal democracy, and… Read more »
Helping Europe through its crisis of illiberal politics
Twenty years after the U.S. brokered peace in Bosnia, leaders who once pledged to rebuild a European democracy here are shunning the West, The Wall Street Journal reports: In the… Read more »
West’s ‘China fantasy’ a conceptual failure and strategic blunder
A top-level meeting of the ruling Chinese Communist Party has endorsed President Xi Jinping as a “core” leader, giving him equal billing with late supreme leaders Deng Xiaoping and Mao… Read more »
Does culture affect foreign policy – and democratization?
Western ideas—which many in the West believe are universal—collide with the ideals of Middle Eastern societies in ways that aren’t always obvious, argues Steven Cook, a Fellow for Middle… Read more »
Hungary: fought for freedom, now content with tyranny?
The crushing of Hungary’s anti-Soviet uprising 60 years ago this week stood as a tragic symbol of communist barbarism throughout the Cold War, notes Arch Puddington, head of research for… Read more »
Iran pursuing China Model?
At 77, and with at least one hospitalization in recent years for prostate cancer, Ayatollah Khamenei appears determined, while he still has full power, to make the changes essential for… Read more »
Authoritarian soft power not drawing many converts
When the Philippines’ tough-guy President Rodrigo Duterte announced in Beijing last week that “America has lost” and that he was “separating” from the United States to align with a rising… Read more »
The future of Arab reform: beyond autocrats and Islamists
The argument for democratic reform in the Middle East seems harder to make today, despite the evidence for it being clearer, than it was when the Arab Spring sprung, argues… Read more »