Like his friend, Chinese President Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin has believed for years that the West is in decline, dysfunctional, and self-obsessed. Domestic political fights, electoral upsets and quarrels among… Read more »
Experts have described Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a new-school despot, a soft autocrat, an anocrat, and a reactionary populist. Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of international affairs at Princeton, has… Read more »
Strategic narratives about the future vary, but they tend to take one of two rough forms, argues Tufts University’s Daniel W. Drezner: Actors with positive expectations believe that the future… Read more »
The war in Ukraine “is an inflection point,” said Jonas Parello-Plesner, executive director at the Alliance of Democracies. “It is not just Ukraine’s fight but a fight for liberal democracy,”… Read more »
Democracies must shift from a defensive posture in the face of autocratic resurgence and democratic decline, and seize the opportunity to reverse these trends at a potential “inflection point remembered… Read more »
In a classic case of Orwellian narrative distortion, China’s Communist authorities have banned the word ‘lockdown’ and ordered state-controlled media to describe the Zero Covid restrictions that confined 25 million… Read more »
The United States has long served as a place of refuge for those fleeing repressive governments. But as authoritarianism creeps across the world and social media grants dissidents a border-crossing… Read more »
“Ukraine has always aspired to be free”, Voltaire wrote back in the eighteenth-century. He knew that most of his French readers could barely find this “unknown land” on a map,… Read more »
“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 »
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 »