Journal of Democracy
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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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 12, 2015
The Cost of Doing Business: Sacrificing Freedom of Expression in China
A few weeks ago, Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei received a letter from the Denmark-based Lego Group rejecting his bulk order for the company’s plastic building-block toys, which the...
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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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August 19, 2015
Reshaping the Rules: The Emergence of Global Authoritarian Counternorms
The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The BRICS Bank. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization. What do these organizations have in common? For starters, China is a major player in each of them. And...
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