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Coup in Tunisia: Is Democracy Lost?
In short, the de facto dissolution of parliament by President Kais Saied in July 2021, abandoning the constitution, and targeting the opposition-all these point to one thing: Tunisia is no longer a democracy and slipped into the autocratic playstore of Arab leaders past and present. Three are the main reasons that this democratisation process came to an abrupt end after a decade in Tunisia: 1) failure to accompany political reform with socio-economic benefits accruing to the people; 2) this followed the rise of populism; and 3) mistakes by the Islamic party. For Tunisia and the Arab world to move on, prodemocratic forces should relate freedom, development and social justice.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
The Rebirth of the Liberal World Order?
Vladimir Putin's war on Ukraine has given the world's democrats a new sense of unity and purpose. Galvanized by a sense of common threat and existential peril, the Western democracies have slapped biting sanctions on Russia, boosted weapons and aid shipments to Ukraine, and upped military spending dramatically. This energetic and coordinated response by the Western democracies contrasts with their tepid responses to the past decade of democratic malaise, marked by grave—though slow and surreptitious—authoritarian attacks. The Russian invasion may also undermine the emerging "authoritarian international" because the conflict has proved far more difficult and costly to Russia than expected. Whether the invasion proves a turning point for the liberal world order depends partly on whether the world's democrats can hold together through the crisis.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
How Zelensky Has Changed Ukraine
In the fog of war and amid Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's wartime leadership-inspiring as it has been-one should not forget how politics in Ukraine functioned for decades before Russia's full-scale invasion. The dangers to democracy in Ukraine even from a Ukrainian victory include the resurgence of one of the most important political features of independent Ukraine prior to Zelensky, the partially staged democratic elections. The Ukrainian politicians who did have the authoritarian ambitions periodically forced people to vote for them through economic pressure; consequently, many Ukrainians thought that they were treated as extras on a stage and were not agents of their political destiny. All of these manipulations have touched not only election outcomes but also what democratic institutions could mean for the Ukrainians who were under such pressure. The danger of a return to political theater in Ukraine in the aftermath of victory does not flow only from the threat of Russian occupation and the so-called "referenda" engineered by the Kremlin at gunpoint. There is economic precariousness brought about by war and privations.1
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
The Politics of Enemies
What is democracy for? A minimalist account defines it as a mechanism for making collective choices regarding the distribution of power, influence, and recognition. If this is all that democracy is, the definition fails to explain why some people have been prepared to die for democracy. Substantive definitions explain why we should care, but they have problems too. Those who would have democracy mean something more say it expresses a society's belief in the sovereign individual citizen as the ultimate source of political legitimacy. As John Dewey and others defined it, democracy is "a way of life," a form of government that enables the members of a political community to share a common experience and live their moral values.1
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
China’s Threat to Global Democracy
An increasingly powerful yet anxious China is undertaking an extreme program to make the world safe for autocracy, and to corrupt and destroy democracies. Democracy promotion may be out of style in U.S. foreign policy today, but democracy prevention most certainly remains at the very heart of the Chinese game plan today.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
In Europe, Democracy Erodes from the Right
We aim to diagnose democratic vulnerabilities of Europe by conducting experiments that probe Europeans' ability to recognize and punish politicians who undermine democracy. We find evidence of two consistent reservoirs of tolerance for authoritarianism across seven countries: the illiberal right and the disengaged. First, citizens in the illiberal right support parties on the extreme, populist, radical, or nationalist right. Those in the second group are citizens who do not vote, but who, in many countries, are latent supporters of the illiberal right and who show just as much leniency toward transgressions against democracy. The source of the illiberal right's tolerance of authoritarianism thus appears to lie not in how much it cares about its signature issues-immigration or traditional values-but rather in how little it cares about democracy. Overt and latent authoritarian potential rests with the far-right fringes of Europe's electorates.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
Is Iran on the Verge of Another Revolution?
How should we make sense of this "Women, Life, Liberty" Iran, this completely novel political uprising which came into being with the death of the Kurdish Mahsa Zhina Amini in September 2022 while in police custody, following her arrest for wearing an "improper" hijab? Neither a "feminist revolution" per se, nor just the revolt of the new generation-nor about compulsory hijab. It is a movement of life restitution, of emancipation towards a free and dignified life from an internal colonization. As the first objects of such colonization, women have become protagonists of a movement that may take the Islamic Republic through a revolutionary course.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
The Putin Myth
The quality of governance declined gradually over the last decade and thus undermined the narrative of competence Putin built during his first two terms as president. The regime has been relying less on persuasion and more on scaring its population since 2012—a trend accelerating with the setbacks of Russian military actions in Ukraine. That ill-fated war now risks the complete annihilation of the myth of autocratic competence. The Russian example underlines the value of identifying and analyzing changes in the quality of autocracies and invites a better understanding of why autocracies become more reliant on violent repression rather than spinning an informational narrative of legitimacy and competence.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
Why Russia’s Democracy Never Began
Most scholars blame Russia's recent re-autocratization on mistakes of individual leaders - Yeltsin or Putin. This essay challenges such accounts. It argues instead that, in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, Russia did not experience a democratic transition; instead, it experienced a temporary weakening of the state - in other words, a weakening of incumbent capacity. The above is evidenced by the fact that elite rotation did not take place in Russia and the very same type of formal and informal institutions characteristic for the country's political system were preserved, which means that subsequent re-autocratization of the Russian politics was just a matter of time.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
How AI Threatens Democracy
But generative AI can disrupt politics in unparalleled ways. The sudden rise is already blowing up journalism, finance, and medicine. Such simple acts as asking a chatbot to get around the complexities of some thickheaded bureaucracy or to help with drafting a letter to an elected official would further bolster civic engagement. It is exactly this technology that threatens democratic representation, democratic accountability, and social and political trust because it has the very potential to proliferate disinformation and misinformation en masse. This essay examines the scope of the threat in each of these spheres and considers possible guardrails for these misuses, including neural networks for identifying generated content, self-regulation by generative-AI platforms, and increased digital literacy on the part of the public and elites alike.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
How Financial Secrecy Undermines Democracy
This enormous explosion in the financial-secrecy system undermines democracy to a frightening extent. The system has distorted capitalism and its elites relationship with taxation and the public realm in ways that mighty vested interests have grown attached to the financial system promoting a) shielding, and therefore enabling kleptocracy, crime, and foreign interference, and b) enhancing inequality on a scale barely recognized partly because of the secrecy. The state of the public realm does show that capitalism with a secrecy system has become increasingly hard for a democratic polity to hold accountable. Understanding the architecture of the financial-secrecy system allows one to identify how to conduct its deconstruction.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
The Autocrat-in-Training: The Sisi Regime at 10
It has been ten years since General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi took over the Egyptian presidency. He has presided over an autocratic trial-and-error system of governance, putting personal whims and instincts above the interests of the Egyptian people. The president's state-led infrastructure projects-manifested in a raft of new cities and a new Suez Canal-driven economic growth in the initial stages, but cloaked deep-seated economic weaknesses. His military-based economic approach extended the role of the military in the economy, leading to an unstable autocracy that relies heavily on coercion and external support. Economic policies under Sisi have been characterized by heavy borrowing and austerity measures; the brunt of these has fallen on low- and middle-class citizens, entailing increased poverty and social discontent. Despite the attempts at economic reform, the rule of Sisi has retained features of personalist rule, including aversion to formal institutions and reliance on repression as an anti-opposition policy, in a precarious situation, economically and politically speaking, of Egypt.
By Global Updateabout a year ago in Education
