Populist leaders often claim to speak for “the people,” a unified mass that supposedly represents the authentic core of the nation. They pose as champions of the people’s interests, but gradually conflate their personal interests with those of the people. Citizens who oppose the leader are depicted as somehow alien to the nation, traitorous agents […]
After the stunning collapse of the Iranian regime in 1979, country risk analysts everywhere became desirous of some method to better calculate the risk of political instability in countries across the world. For many, the holy grail became some type of quantitative index that would rank countries based on their potential for instability. Read Here […]
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States—a man who has praised dictators, encouraged violence among supporters, threatened to jail his rival, and labeled the mainstream media as “the enemy”—has raised fears that the United States may be heading toward authoritarianism. While predictions of a descent into fascism are overblown, the Trump […]
It is easy to say that nothing that is happening right now is normal, that the world has changed. It is harder but no less important to think about whether what seems strange right now does not amount to significant change in the future. Read Here – The Washington Post
Social democracy now lies in ruins, its ragbag of policies rejected by electorates. Its heyday was the trente glorieuses, 1945–75, but, as Marc Levinson recounts in An Extraordinary Time, the splendid outcomes during these years cannot be attributed primarily to good economic policy choices. Read Here – The Times Literary Supplement
Calculated outrage is an old political trick, but nobody in the history of American politics has deployed it as aggressively, as repeatedly, or with such success as Donald Trump. If there is harsh law enforcement by the Trump administration, it will benefit the president not to the extent that it quashes unrest, but to the […]
All societies draw on nationalism of one sort or another to define relations between the state, the citizen and the outside world. Craig Calhoun, an American sociologist, argues that cosmopolitan elites, who sometimes yearn for a post-nationalist order, underestimate “how central nationalist categories are to political and social theory—and to practical reasoning about democracy, political […]
Populists, for instance, should not be confused with authoritarians and despots; they embrace the “democratic competition for power” instead of subverting it. Furthermore, populism “is not an ideology” but a political and moral rhetoric that pits ordinary people (noble victims) against elites (treacherously self-serving). Read Here – BloombergView
China’s ongoing annual political high season has provided a key window through which observers can better understand China’s development and its outlook. However, if the nation and the annual two-week events are still viewed with rigid impressions offered by the West, then conclusions drawn are likely to be defective. Read Here = Xinhua
Liberal democracy was the core ideology of the foundation of Pakistan, something that was clearly articulated by Mohammad Ali Jinnah in an interview to Reuters in 1946. “The new state,” he said, “would be a modern democratic state with sovereignty resting in the people and the members of the new nation having equal rights of […]
looking beyond borders 