April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
How Autocrats Weaponize Women’s Rights
Why are authoritarian regimes championing gender equality? Modern dictators want to appear progressive, liberal, and democratic, while distracting from their worst abuses.
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April 2022, Volume 33, Issue 2
Why are authoritarian regimes championing gender equality? Modern dictators want to appear progressive, liberal, and democratic, while distracting from their worst abuses.
January 1999, Volume 10, Issue 1
Excerpts from: the forward of the final report of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission by Chairperson Archbishop Desmond Tutu; a letter to the Vietnamese National Assembly deploring corruption in the Community Party by four Party veterans; an address on democratization in Burma by Kyaw Kyaw of the Thailand-based All Burma Student’s Democratic Front; former…
January 2015, Volume 26, Issue 1
A review of An Uncanny Era: Conversations Between Václav Havel and Adam Michnik, translated and edited by Elzbieta Matynia.
April 2001, Volume 12, Issue 2
A review of Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress, edited by Lawrence E. Harrison and Samuel P. Huntington.
Authoritarians are developing new tools to project their malign influence across the globe. The world of sports can teach us a lot about the games they play.
January 2000, Volume 11, Issue 1
Excerpts from: a statement by Cuban dissidents entitled “All United”; a letter by former dissidents of the Soviet bloc to the so-called “Group of Four” critics of the Castro regime in Cuba; an address delivered by the Commonwealth’s outgoing secretary-general Chief Emeka Anayaoku; the “Seoul Statement” on human rights in North Korea; Abdurrahman Wahid’s speech…
July 2000, Volume 11, Issue 3
Democracy is spreading everywhere except in the Arab world. Arab elections are an immense masquerade. Corrupt dictatorships seek to stifle freedom of thought and to control the flow of information.
October 2023, Volume 34, Issue 4
A final statement by Russian activist and opposition politician Alexei Navalny; The North Atlantic Council’s communiqué on Ukraine; Legal analyst Ethan Hee-Seok’s testimony on North Korean asylum-seekers at the China–North Korea border; “Voices of a New Belarus” by playwright Andrei Kureichik; Guatemalan president-elect Bernardo Arévalo’s victory speech.
April 2018, Volume 29, Issue 2
A review of Democracy in Iran: Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed by Misagh Parsa.
January 2014, Volume 25, Issue 1
A review of The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be by Moisés Naím.
October 2010, Volume 21, Issue 4
Excerpts from: remarks by Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt, U.S. secretary of state Hillary Clinton, and president of the European parliament Jerzy Buzek given to mark the tenth anniversary of the Community of Democracies; the inaugural address of president of the Philippines Benigno S. (Noynoy) Aquino III.
Election observers are the first line of defense for democratic rights and freedoms, and they work in some of the most challenging places. They deserve the same protections as human-rights defenders.
July 2024, Volume 35, Issue 3
The “crisis” of democracy is a crisis of representation. New parties, some of which are populist in troublingly illiberal ways, are arising from this moment. The danger that they pose is not that they are antidemocratic, but that they are antiliberal.
April 2013, Volume 24, Issue 2
Evidence of the evil perpetrated in North Korea’s prison camps continues to emerge, as most vividly highlighted by Blaine Harden’s Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West.
October 2023, Volume 34, Issue 4
A review of Beijing Rules: How China Weaponized Its Economy to Confront the World, by Bethany Allen.
October 2014, Volume 25, Issue 4
Indonesia’s 2014 legislative elections went smoothly. Yet the “money politics” that featured so heavily in these contests suggests a grave need to reform the country’s electoral system.
October 2015, Volume 26, Issue 4
A review of Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy by Francis Fukuyama.
July 2022, Volume 33, Issue 3
The case of Hungary shows how autocrats can rig elections legally, using legislative majorities to change the law and neutralize the opposition at every turn, no matter what strategy they adopt.
This is the darkest moment for freedom in half a century. Whether democracy regains its footing will depend on how democratic leaders and citizens respond to emboldened authoritarians and the fissures within their own societies.
April 2015, Volume 26, Issue 2
Excerpts from: newly elected Sri Lankan president Maithripala Sirisena’s campaign manifesto; Newsweek Polska's interview with Boris Nemtsov; opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim's statement of innocence issued after the Federal Court of Malaysia upheld his conviction and sentence; a statement issued by UN special rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and association Maina Kiai.