Are the authoritarians who grace, or disgrace, our world, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Vladimir Putin, more like or unlike their twentieth-century predecessors? Two new books, each with virtues of… Read more »
How to increase faith in democracy? Tarek Masoud asks. At a recent Harvard seminar, the co-editor of the Journal of Democracy presented data from the Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) project… Read more »
China today attacked Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavsky for meeting with exiled Tibetan leader Sikyong Penpa Tsering. The encounter is likely to aggravate already tense relations between China and the… Read more »
Tunisia’s president has been carrying out a creeping coup, demolishing the country’s hard-fought democratic gains bit by bit. With an economy in turmoil and a splintered opposition, is there… Read more »
China’s authoritarian surveillance state crushed Covid-19 when it first appeared in Wuhan in early 2020 and trumpeted that success to the world. Now, more than two years later, the Omicron variant… Read more »
A well-known Ethiopian proverb runs: “When the great lord passes, the peasants bow and silently fart”. Voters in countries like Kenya, Malawi and Zambia have always critiqued those in power… Read more »
Western democracies are demonstrating fresh resolve in defending Ukraine, but still need to demonstrate sufficient resilience by addressing domestic backsliding, according to a new Freedom House report. While some democratic… Read more »
Embrace non-state actors – that’s one of several lessons from research and grass roots activism that show how the Global Fragility Act can improve ways to advance democracy in fragile… Read more »
Are man-made crises like the one in Shanghai inevitable under China’s authoritarian system? China is facing what is arguably the worst crisis in governance since the end of the Cultural… Read more »
Only 34 of the earth’s 195 states are liberal democracies — where citizens enjoy free speech, free press, free and fair elections, and other liberties — according to the latest… Read more »