Samuel P. Huntington was Albert J. Weatherhead III University Professor and director of the John M. Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. His many books include The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (1991) and The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (1996).
Like the “transition paradigm” before it, the concept of democratic backsliding threatens to flatten our perceptions of complex political realities. Examples from East-Central Europe illustrate the ambiguous dynamics at play…
