Civil Society Crackdown
May 26, 2016
Freedom for Khadija, But Not For Azerbaijan
Guest post by Elspeth Suthers. On May 25, 2016—two days before her fortieth birthday—Azerbaijani journalist Khadija Ismayilova was released from the prison where she had spent the past one year, five...
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May 17, 2016
Crackdowns on Citizen Election Monitors Reveal Authoritarian Fear
Guest blog post by Patrick Merloe, contributing author to the edited volume, Authoritarianism Goes Global: The Challenge to Democracy.Nonpartisan election monitoring, spanning over 100 countries, embodies a movement of millions...
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January 28, 2016
Freedom in the World: What’s Behind the Decade of Decline?
Guest post by Arch Puddington. According to Freedom in the World, a report issued annually by Freedom House, global democracy has experienced a decade of decline. This represents far-and-away the most...
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January 27, 2016
In Ethiopia, a Mix of Regulations and Repression Silence Independent Voices
Guest post by Simegnish "Lily" Mengesha. After a tense year marked by widely-criticized elections in which Ethiopia’s ruling party won 100 percent of parliamentary seats, 2015 concluded with yet more repression...
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December 17, 2015
In Kazakhstan, the New Year May Ring in New Online Restrictions
On November 30, 2015, the authorities in Kazakhstan fired off the latest salvo in authoritarian regimes’ battle against Internet freedom. Kazakhtelecom, the Central Asian country’s largest telecommunications company, released a...
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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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