Terms like “democratic recession” and “backsliding” are misleading and breed fatalism, diverting attention from potential paths out of the new authoritarianism, says a leading analyst. Authoritarians have now shown that… Read more »
To support claims of “democratic backsliding” or “autocratisation”, analysts usually turn to annual quantitative scores of countries’ democratic vigor, The Economist observes. These widely cited indices, published by think-tanks like… Read more »
Now freighted with evidence of mass atrocities and war crimes, the Russo-Ukrainian war is the strongest geopolitical and moral earthquake in Europe since the Cold War. The effects will thus… Read more »
The Third Wave expansion of global democracy was underpinned by the success and durability of democracy in the United States itself — what the political scientist Joseph Nye labels its… Read more »
The Balkans Don’t Believe the EU Anymore, Atlantic Council analysts Benjamin Haddad and Damir Marusic argue in Foreign Policy. The fact that EU members such as Hungary and Poland are backsliding… Read more »
On Wednesday morning, police in Mwanza, in northern Tanzania, surrounded the hotel occupied by members of the country’s main opposition party, Chadema, and arrested 11 party members, including the party chairman, Freeman Mbowe, analyst… Read more »
The list is grim: a draconian crackdown in Nicaragua; bloody repression in Myanmar; a tightening grip by Beijing on Hong Kong. The backsliding of democracy, though, goes back far before… Read more »
Although democracy is supposedly a core pillar of the transatlantic relationship, in practice this component of EU-U.S. relations has withered over the last decade, notes Carnegie analyst Richard Youngs. The… Read more »