Russia
November 19, 2015
Controlling the Script: The Kremlin’s Disinformation Machine
By now, many have viewed with puzzled amusement the mega-macho images trotted out by Russian media outlets of President Vladimir Putin riding a Harley, winning hockey games, and playing with...
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November 17, 2015
Distorting International Standards to Undermine Civil Society
Civil society around the world has fallen on hard times. Fifteen years after the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Millennium Declaration trumpeted the value of non-governmental organizations and civil...
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November 10, 2015
Assad’s Lifeline: The Authoritarian Stabilization Pact in Syria
Guest post by Steven Heydemann. The Syrian conflict has become a testing ground for techniques of authoritarian stabilization—the coordinated efforts of an interconnected network of authoritarian governments to prop up a...
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November 5, 2015
Fear of the Unknown: Strategic Uncertainty and Self-Censorship
The independent Russian television channel TV Rain’s troubles accelerated with an online poll asking whether, during the Second World War, the Soviet Union ought to have surrendered the city of...
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October 20, 2015
Stifling the Public Sphere: Media and Civil Society in Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam
This blog post is based on the introduction to a new report—“Stifling the Public Sphere: Media and Civil Society in Egypt, Russia, and Vietnam”—produced by the International Forum for Democratic...
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September 22, 2015
The “GONGO Show”: Authoritarian Imposters Crowd-Out Civil Society
The closing space for civil society has been well documented, but sometimes modern autocrats find it more convenient to manipulate civic space than to close it. Contemporary authoritarian regimes are...
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