Volume 36, Issue 2
Voters around the world are losing faith in democracy’s ability to deliver and increasingly turning toward more authoritarian alternatives. To restore citizens’ confidence, democracies must show they can make progress without sacrificing accountability.
Delivery matters, but so do leaders’ actions. Why have so many, in both strong and weak economies, been pushing against democratic constraints on their power, and why have those constraints failed to contain them?
Ukraine versus Russia is a modern David versus Goliath conflict that matters not only for the future of Ukraine, but for that of democracy itself.
When South Korea’s president declared martial law last December, he shocked the country and sparked a political crisis that laid bare deep-seated divisions. Can Korean democracy overcome the nationalist polarization that has always defined it?
Everything we know about getting and keeping democracy suggests we should be, at best, cautious about the prospects for Syria’s democratic future. But, as this collection of essays suggests, there are reasons for hope.
Syrians rejoiced when Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell. After decades of dictatorship and civil war, Syrians must now rebuild their country while seeking justice for the victims of authoritarian rule.
After the collapse of the Assad regime, Syria stands at a crossroads. Nothing is assured, but the country’s civil society is its best hope for charting a democratic future.
Despite a brutal thirteen-year civil war, Syrians are not building from scratch. In fact, Syria has a long and rich history of state-building to guide them.
The ruling BJP has long sought to sideline Indian Muslims. But even the opposition is opting to exclude them politically. Muslims’ chances at greater representation remain dim.
Propaganda is autocrats’ weapon of first resort, allowing them to rely on persuasion rather than violence to achieve their ends. But citizens have grown savvy, so autocrats are taking a new tack: spreading their messages via private news outlets indirectly controlled by regime proxies.
Democratic backsliding is usually seen as something driven by presidents, but under certain circumstances elected legislatures can cause it, too. Legislative hegemony is a growing danger.
The “third wave” of democracy started in 1974 — or so the story goes. But the crests and crashes of waves of democracy and authoritarianism have been neglected. A close look can help us understand the current moment, when democracy appears to be in retreat.
Democracy across the world is being undermined by the very forces that once made it possible: the liberal economic order and political competition. The global concentration of wealth has made democratic governance less effective and stripped the people of their power.
When the “third wave” reached Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s, it brought major advances for democracy. By the first decade of the current century, however, advances had given way to stasis and even erosion.
A Ukrainian human-rights lawyer on moral responsibility during war; Nilofar Shidmehr’s poem “Say Her Name: Mahsa Jina Amini”; a Cuban prodemocracy activist vows to never give up; Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya on Belarus’s sham election; a Zimbabwean journalist turns himself in to police; the frontlines of the protests in Georgia; and an open letter to Xi Jinping.
