Authoritarian Cooperation & Learning
January 27, 2016
In Ethiopia, a Mix of Regulations and Repression Silence Independent Voices
Guest post by Simegnish "Lily" Mengesha. After a tense year marked by widely-criticized elections in which Ethiopia’s ruling party won 100 percent of parliamentary seats, 2015 concluded with yet more repression...
READ MOREDecember 22, 2015
Framing the Agenda: China’s Use of International Fora to Promote ‘Internet Sovereignty’
Last week in Wuzhen, China, Chinese President Xi Jinping during his opening keynote remarks made clear the theme of China’s second World Internet Conference, “An Interconnected World Shared and Governed by...
READ MOREDecember 17, 2015
In Kazakhstan, the New Year May Ring in New Online Restrictions
On November 30, 2015, the authorities in Kazakhstan fired off the latest salvo in authoritarian regimes’ battle against Internet freedom. Kazakhtelecom, the Central Asian country’s largest telecommunications company, released a...
READ MOREDecember 8, 2015
Increasingly Under Control: Five Years of Decline in Freedom on the Net
Frequent readers of this blog will not be surprised that authoritarian regimes are investing heavily in methods of obstructing and manipulating online speech. These investments have paid dividends: in each...
READ MORENovember 17, 2015
Distorting International Standards to Undermine Civil Society
Civil society around the world has fallen on hard times. Fifteen years after the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Millennium Declaration trumpeted the value of non-governmental organizations and civil...
READ MORENovember 10, 2015
Assad’s Lifeline: The Authoritarian Stabilization Pact in Syria
Guest post by Steven Heydemann. The Syrian conflict has become a testing ground for techniques of authoritarian stabilization—the coordinated efforts of an interconnected network of authoritarian governments to prop up a...
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