Inside Wuhan: China’s struggle to control the virus — and the narrative
Hao Jun, in his late forties, is one of a small but tight-knit group of dissidents based in Wuhan who took it upon themselves to document the earliest days of… Read more »
Search Results for: pandemic
Autocratic assertion meets democratic dereliction
The coronavirus pandemic must not be used as a pretext for authoritarian states to trample over individual human rights, or repress the free flow of information, the UN secretary general… Read more »
Call to free Iran’s women political prisoners: Virus ‘exacerbates regime’s legitimacy crisis’
The coronavirus is leading Iranians to question the relationship between state and religion, putting the theocratic state in “an unusual and awkward position“, observers suggest. The Islamic Republic had to… Read more »
COVID-19’s new pretexts for consolidating autocrats’ power
Authoritarian-minded leaders around the world have used the coronavirus emergency to consolidate power. In Europe, the governments of Poland and Hungary have done that and more. They have managed to… Read more »
Covid-19 exposing liberal order’s instabilities and weaknesses
The embeddedness of liberal democracies in an interdependent world characterized by relatively free cross-border flows of goods, services, assets and people has amplified the virulent effects of highly contagious deadly… Read more »
Friends and Enemies: Understanding Chinese political interference
United States intelligence agencies have assessed that Chinese operatives helped push disinformation about #Covid-19 messages across platforms, according to six American officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to… Read more »
Russian, Chinese, Iranian disinformation narratives echoing each other
China, Iran and Russia are using the coronavirus crisis to launch a propaganda and disinformation onslaught against the United States, the State Department warns in a new analysis, POLITICO’s Betsy… Read more »
Hong Kong’s constitutional crisis escalates
As the world has been engulfed by the coronavirus pandemic, the authorities in Hong Kong have arrested prominent pro-democracy figures in politics, civil society and the media, waging a broad… Read more »
Why Russia’s Power Vertical is failing the COVID-19 Challenge
Russia is hardly the only country struggling to respond to the pandemic. But the political consequences of an inadequate response are much greater for a highly centralized and deeply personalized… Read more »
Autocrats present liberal democracies with an ideological challenge
The remote northern Russian region of Komi is a coronavirus petri dish for the horrors lying in wait for the world’s largest country. Amid growing evidence that the pathogen had… Read more »