For decades, Latin America’s authoritarian regimes were seen as a right-wing phenomenon, with Cuba as the lone exception — a dictatorship born not from a betrayal of democracy, but of revolution. As Washington’s embargo returns to the headlines, this piece asks what that framing has long obscured: that Cuba has never had just one embargo, but two.
Analyses
- Renzo Guolo 24 May 2024The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, almost certainly the designated heir of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, has exposed the contradictions at the heart of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Said contradictions lie both in the country’s institutional denomination – a true political oxymoron – and in its constitutional architecture, formed in 1979 when the revolution was still developing, and not yet wholly wedded to its Islamist matrix.
- Hurriyah 30 April 2024After losing four elections, former general and Defense Minister Prabowo Subianto won 58 percent of the vote on February 14, 2024. He and his running mate Gibran Rakabuming Raka, President Jokowi’s eldest son, are expected to be inaugurated as president and vice president in the coming months. In what may have been the worst elections since Indonesia’s post-1998 democratization, Prabowo’s current victory is the result of Machiavellian tactics – unethical cunning to attain personal ambitions – and reflects the fundamental threat to Indonesia’s nascent democracy
- Seán Golden 24 April 2024Jürgen Habermas’ theory of civic discourse imposes binding rules on debate in order to subsequently bind behavior. Perhaps this could be extended to international affairs. Scholar Wang Minmin advocates establishing “a set of negotiable yet binding communicative rules and values, [and] world opinion [that] would both allow civic discourse and act as the binding power of an international norm.” Such an approach would require “that we must first acknowledge the differences in moral orders on both sides, but then also move beyond this to realize the common ground on which both sides stand.”
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- Maria Tavernini 19 April 2024India, a country that loves to be defined as the world’s largest democracy, or the “mother of democracy” – using the words of its Prime Minister Narendra Modi – has just started its 18th general election. The massive democratic exercise is going to take place from today through June 1, with 970 million people heading to the polls in seven phases, with results expected to be announced on June 4. However, many have pointed out that it is not only simply the fact of holding elections that makes a country a democracy. According to V-Dem Institute’s Democracy Report, India dropped down to an “electoral autocracy” in 2018 and stayed in this category up to now.
- Chandra Mallampalli 19 April 2024Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) pose an imminent threat to India’s liberal, secular democracy particularly as their agenda impacts religious minorities and other voices of dissent.
- Fabio Turco 17 April 2024On the weekend of April 6-7, the citizens of both Poland and Slovakia went back to the polls, only six months after elections that resulted in important shifts in their respective governments. These more recent elections constituted a first test for the new executives. The elections in Poland were for local administration, while those in Slovakia were presidential.
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- Alessandra Tommasi 5 April 2024Turkey’s local elections on March 31 produced a historic result: the main opposition party, the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, won 37.7 percent of the vote, beating President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling AK Party (35.5 percent) for the first time in more than two decades in power. If the CHP’s result is not surprising in Turkey’s big cities, the AKP also lost regions such as Anatolia, once considered strongholds of the majority party. It was “a turning point,” as Erdogan stressed after the results of the elections. But the CHP’s “victory” was more of an AKP’s resounding defeat, according to Cengiz Aktar, professor of Turkish and Modern Asian Studies at the University of Athens.