April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
India’s New Minority Politics
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.
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April 2025, Volume 36, Issue 2
The Rise of Legislative Authoritarianism
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.
January 2025, Volume 36, Issue 1
The Return of Politics in Bangladesh
The student movement that toppled Bangladesh’s longtime autocratic ruler wants more than a return to the old order. These young revolutionaries are seizing a chance to start anew. How and by whom will the country’s future be decided?
July 2025, Volume 36, Issue 3
Secularism, Islamism, and the Future of Turkey
The political struggle between President Erdoğan and opposition leader Ekrem İmamoğlu is a fierce battle for the country’s democracy. But it goes deeper than that. It is also a struggle between Islamist and secularist visions of Turkey.
July 2025, Volume 36, Issue 3
Religious Exclusion and the Origins of Democracy
The most challenging type of diversity for democracy is religious diversity. This also helps explain why modern democracy first took root in Western Europe: Religiously homogenous populations went hand in hand with the early formation of parliaments.
April 2019, Volume 30, Issue 2
Artificial Intelligence and Human Rights
It is imperative that artificial intelligence evolve in ways that respect human rights. Happily, standards found in landmark UN documents can help with the task of making AI serve rather than subjugate human beings.
October 2021, Volume 32, Issue 4
India’s Endangered Democracy
Shortcomings in governance and electoral administration may be accelerating India’s slide to autocracy. Were these flaws embedded in Indian democracy from the start?
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
Books in Review: Opening North Korea
A review of Witness to Transformation: Refugee Insights into North Korea by Marcus Noland and Stephan Haggard.
October 2009, Volume 20, Issue 4
Iran in Ferment: Cracks in the Regime
The Islamic Republic is struggling, with the Revolutionary Guard Corps more and more the only thing propping it up.
January 2016, Volume 27, Issue 1
The Quest for Good Governance: Learning from Virtuous Circles
Are the “virtuous circles” crucial to good governance always the product of long-term developments under unique historical circumstances, or can they be started or accelerated by wise policies?
April 2009, Volume 20, Issue 2
Reading Russia: The Siloviki in Charge
Since Vladimir Putin’s rise to power at the end of the 1990s, siloviki—the people who work for, or used to work for, Russia’s “ministries of force” have spread to posts throughout all the branches of power in Russia.
October 2004, Volume 15, Issue 4
Latin American Presidencies Interrupted
Over the last two decades, Latin America has seen more than a dozen presidencies come to a premature end. It is time to consider changing constitutional designs that promote conflict rather than more consensual ways of doing politics.
April 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2
Latin America’s New Turbulence: Crisis and Integrity in Brazil
Public anger at revelations of widespread corruption, along with the rising cost of coalition politics, has brought Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff to the brink of impeachment. Yet the crisis has also revealed the strength of the country’s law-enforcement and judicial institutions.
April 2014, Volume 25, Issue 2
Ethnic Power Sharing: Three Big Problems
In severely divided societies, ethnic cleavages tend to produce ethnic parties and ethnic voting. Power-sharing institutions can ameliorate this problem, but attempts to establish such institutions, whether based on a consociational or a centripetal model, face formidable difficulties.
April 2003, Volume 14, Issue 2
The Cracked Foundations of the Right to Secede
The claim that ethnic minorities have a moral and legal right to secede from states is a dangerous fiction with perilous implications for divided societies.
April 2011, Volume 22, Issue 2
Liberation Technology: Whither Internet Control?
Paradoxically, the rising profile of “liberation technology” may push Internet-control efforts into nontechnological areas—imprisonment rather than censorship, for example—for which there is no easy technical “fix.”
July 2003, Volume 14, Issue 3
Lessons from Bosnia and Herzegovina: Travails of the European Raj
Like liberals in the British East India Company more than a century ago, European and international officials have become stewards of a people's fate. The intentions are good, but will self-government result?
January 2020, Volume 31, Issue 1
Democracy’s Inevitable Elites
Robert Michels’s classic work on the “iron law of oligarchy” can help us to understand why there is so much dissatisfaction with representative democracy.
April 2016, Volume 27, Issue 2
Burma Votes for Change: The Challenges Ahead
Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy swept Burma’s November 2015 elections. Will the new NLD-led government be able to live up to high expectations that it will deliver better governance, national reconciliation, and some form of federalism?
October 2007, Volume 18, Issue 4
Is East-Central Europe Backsliding? The Strange Death of the Liberal Consensus
The paradox of East-Central Europe is that the rise of populism is an outcome not of the failures but of the successes of postcommunist liberalism. *This is a corrected text of the print and original online version of this essay, which lacked proper citation for some of its sources. This is the only version that…