Authoritarian governments increasingly adopt technology-centric national strategies and methods of internal governance. They control their societies through digital censorship, propaganda, and surveillance, and use these same tools to manipulate foreign… Read more »
Budapest’s response to the Coronavirus pandemic has been to suspend parliament and give Prime Minister Viktor Orbán open-ended powers to rule by decree. Will the latest move by the ruling… Read more »
The COVID-19 pandemic will exacerbate the very weaknesses that have marked the democratic erosion of the last decade in most of the 137 developing and transformation countries examined in the… Read more »
An amateur but very determined historian, Yuri Dmitriev, finally found the gruesome prize he had long been searching for — burial mounds containing the remains of political prisoners executed by… Read more »
Hong Kong authorities arrested fifteen prominent activists, including former lawmakers, in what is thought to be the largest crackdown (HT: CFR) on the city’s pro-democracy movement since mass protests began… Read more »
Populist politics tilts authoritarian. In sweeping away supposedly corrupt elites and institutions, the populist leader weakens all forces standing in his way. Critics becomes enemies, constitutional constraints become obstacles to… Read more »
China isn’t the only authoritarian regime to take advantage of the Covid-19 pandemic to expand its sharp power in an effort to undermine democratic norms and institutions. Russia’s decade-long health… Read more »
China has been buying up ads on U.S. social-media sites and adopting online tactics reminiscent of Russian disinformation campaigns in an apparent attempt to shape the story internationally about the… Read more »
Pandemics are democratizing experiences and can also catalyze social change. The Atlantic’s Ed Yong writes: People, businesses, and institutions have been remarkably quick to adopt or call for practices that… Read more »
“What factors and conditions should exist for local pro-democracy, human rights, and labor organizations to effect positive change?” The U.S. Department of State Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL)… Read more »