kolu real voice

There’s a fine line between genuine cybersecurity and digital authoritarianism. Many autocrats use the pretext of digital order to surveil, silence, and suppress their citizens. State cyber repression creates a climate of fear around social media and the internet, shrinking one of the last remaining spaces for free speech.

Francis Fukuyama, one of the world’s leading scholars of democracy, has written for the Journal of Democracy more than two-dozen times over the last thirty-two years. The following essays include some of his most incisive, offering bold insights into the relationship between democracy, modernization, and political culture.

A week from today, voters across all 27 European Union countries will head to the polls to elect the next European Parliament. The following Journal of Democracy essays chronicle the far right’s rise across Europe and consider the dangers it presents in the region and beyond.

As artificial intelligence continues to advance at breakneck speed and world powers vie against each other in the AI arms race, democracies are searching for ways to control a technology that is transforming our lives while threatening to break our democratic guardrails.

DeepSeek’s new frontier AI model is the CCP’s most powerful tool yet for surveillance and control. The following Journal of Democracy essays show how authoritarian governments leverage emerging tech to enhance repression. Read free for a limited time.

After years of increasingly authoritarian rule, Tanzanian president Samia Suluhu Hassan was hailed as a democratic reformer. But as Dan Paget and Aikande Clement Kwayu write in the July issue of the JoD, the president is more performer than reformer, relying on theatrics to delay real reform while sharpening her tools of repression.