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Erica Chenweth begins “Trends in Nonviolent Resistance and State Response: Is Violence Towards Civilian-based Movements on the Rise?” (Global Responsibility to Protect[1], July 2017) with the following rather discouraging statement, at least if you’re a protester: Through 2010, nonviolent mass movements tended to be surprisingly effective in removing incumbent leaders from power or achieving territorial independence, even when they experienced some repression from the government. However, since 2010, the success rates of nonviolent campaigns have declined by a staggering rate (about 20% below the average)

She speculates that the cause of the this decline is due to Authoritarian Adaptation: the ability of authoritarian governments to adopt more politically savvy repressive tools may be part of the reason for the decline in success rates in the past six years.21. Authoritarian leaders have begun to develop and systematize sophisticated techniques to undermine and thwart nonviolent activists.

Dana R. Fisher, Kenneth T. Andrews, Neal Caren, Erica Chenoweth, Michael T. Heaney, Tommy Leung, L. Nathan Perkins, and Jeremy Pressman in “The science of contemporary street protest: New efforts in the United States” (Science Advances, October 23, 2019). This is a fascinating article, which I encourage all big data fans to read in full. From the abstract: This article reviews the two most central methods for studying street protest on a large scale: building comprehensive event databases and conducting field surveys of participants at demonstrations.

Urgent necessities of a domestic nature have determined the timing of Operation Peace Spring that Turkey launched Oct. 9 along the Syrian border east of the Euphrates against the Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which has been building a self-rule in the region thanks to US protection and military support.

the operation came in the wake of the local elections earlier this year in which the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) suffered major losses. The economic crisis bruising Turkey proved a major factor in the party’s debacles in big cities in the March 31 polls and the June 23 rerun of the mayoral vote in Istanbul, giving impetus to rupture trends within the AKP.

Ankara is greatly concerned over the prospect of a new refugee influx from Idlib that would further entangle Turkey’s Syrian refugee problem. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan had warned in September that Turkey cannot tolerate another refugee wave atop the 3.6 million Syrians it is already hosting

Poverty, inadequate public health infrastructure, citizen mistrust, and violent conflict are among the underlying conditions that make countries more susceptible to the pandemic’s ravages

Things in Tanzania got markedly worse in April, when three members of the country’s parliament died from unknown causes within days of each other. Suspecting COVID-19, members of the main opposition party, Chadema, called for the suspension of parliament and COVID-19 testing for all parliamentary members, staff, and families. Chadema Chairman Freeman Mbowe accused the Magufuli government of a cover-up regarding the extent of coronavirus infections in Tanzania. Magufuli’s government was vague in its response, acknowledging the three deaths but leaving speculation about the cause of their deaths unanswered. Late that month, the Tanzanian government submitted its COVID-19 infection data to the World Health Organization, reporting 509 cases and 21 deaths. It has not updated the figures since. It is hard to trust these numbers; scores of observers have noted the difficulty many African countries have had effectively collecting data.

In the intervening months, Magufuli has officially suspended parliament. In May, he also dismissed the head of Tanzania’s national laboratory—which leads COVID-19 testing—and he has since declared that the coronavirus was “absolutely finished” throughout the nation. He’s gone on to insist that credible national elections will be held in October, although that seems unlikely.

How do we recognise government attempts to deform a liberal democracy so as to get their way? As Putin, Erdogan and a host of others have demonstrated, there must be 50 ways to lose your constitution as any kind of constraint on incumbents exercising raw power as they wish. Perhaps the majority party calls the legislature to consider new laws at 5.30am (without informing the opposition). Or perhaps the opposition is notified but opposing MPs are intimidated by an induced deadline crisis and media blackguarding in every lobby. Perhaps a president suspends the legislature for a lengthy period and governs alone using decree powers supposedly reserved for an emergency, as many a Latin American banana republic did before the transition from authoritarian rule.

All the ‘British constitution’ texts have long reiterated the same message. The lack of codification of the UK’s constitution presented no substantial dangers, but instead gifted the country with a set of legal and constitutional arrangements that could easily flex and adapt for changing times and situations. The UK would have none of the irresolvable legacy problems of written constitutions gone obsolescent, such as the USA’s current enduring problems over the Second Amendment on the carrying of firearms. A great deal of faith was also placed in British elites’ developed respect for Parliament, for public opinion and for legality.

Theresa May’s government demonstrated not an elite responsiveness to MPs after 2017, but instead an increasingly frenzied exploitation of a host of parliamentary micro-institutions to bulldoze the May-Whitehall compromise Brexit deal through a reluctant Commons where government policies had no majority. This was the curtain raiser for the Johnson government’s more grand-scale effort to unilaterally rework the UK constitution so as to give the PM ‘governance by decree’ powers.

How has the political culture changed in Egypt due to the emergence of political memes and the influencers behind them?

President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi also recently laughed when he was shown some of the memes referencing the most recent spike in petrol prices, telling the first session of the seventh National Youth Conference held in the New Administrative Capital last month that when the government tackles vital issues it takes into consideration the reaction of people on social media. He said that the government routinely gauges the possible reaction of the people before taking difficult decisions. This demonstrates how the country’s political culture has evolved in the digital age, since physical banners, such as those that were once used in demonstrations, have now often been replaced by digital memes, with the government closely monitoring the Internet in order to gauge the state of public opinion.

Khaled Al-Baramawi, a media commentator, said that Egyptians had always been known for their wit and satire, particularly on political issues. “With the rise of social media, Egyptians have become top producers of digital content,” he said. “When you combine Egyptian humour and online activity, you can understand why digital satire is so popular among Egyptians, including on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms. Politics is a conversation staple, and memes are often produced based on statements by officials.”

For three weeks Sisi’s image has been trashed by an insider turned whistleblower whose videos from self-exile in Spain have gripped and paralysed Egypt in turn. 

Mohamed Ali is, by his own admission, no hero. One of only 10 contractors the army uses, he is corrupt. He also only left Egypt with his family and fortune because his bills had not been paid. Ali is no human rights campaigner. 

"Now you say we are very poor, we must be hungry. Do you get hungry? You spend billions that are spilt on the ground. Your men squander millions. I am not telling a secret. You are a bunch of thieves."

The Uganda government has designated the red beret as official military clothing that could land members of the public who wear them in jail, a move that essentially bans the uniform of leading opposition leader Bobi Wine and his supporters

Wine, a pop star turned politician who has announced he is running for president against longtime leader Yoweri Museveni in 2021, has made the red beret his signature, calling it a "symbol of resistance".

any member of the public found in possession of the items "is liable on conviction to imprisonment for life"

Trends in pandemic-related demonstrations are closely correlated with trends in COVID-19 cases, with spikes in unrest matching infection waves reported throughout 2020. ACLED data show that the majority of these demonstrations have been organized around five main drivers: the risks faced by health workers, the safety of prisoners and ICE detainees, anti-restriction mobilization, the eviction crisis, and school closures.

Over 23% of all demonstrations involving right-wing militias and militarized social movements across the country have been organized in opposition to pandemic-related restrictions. Anti-restriction demonstrations involving these groups turn violent or destructive over 55% of the time, relative to less than 4% of the time when they are not present, underscoring the destabilizing role that militias and other militarized movements can play in right-wing mobilization

While right-wing organizing and militia activity has temporarily abated amid the crackdown on groups and individuals connected to the Capitol riot, these networks — bolstered during reopen rallies throughout 2020 — are likely to reactivate when the next politically salient moment arrives. The ‘anti-vax’ movement could serve as such a catalyst, as anti-vaccine activists are already a growing force at reopen demonstrations (New York Times, 4 May 2020), and have increasingly found common cause with right-wing anti-lockdown demonstrators as they shift their focus to the vaccination rollout (New York Times, 6 February 2021). Many of these demonstrators are new to the ‘anti-vax’ movement, joining as a reaction to the coronavirus pandemic and what they perceive as an attack on civil liberties mounted by the government in response to the health crisis (New York Times, 6 February 2021). Building on the reopen organizing that began in early 2020, organized opposition to the vaccine rollout in early 2021 could serve as an important nexus allowing militias, militant street groups, and other right-wing social movements to develop additional networks for future mobilization.

In recent years, the impressive economic performances of Ethiopia and Rwanda have meant that international donors have become increasingly willing to fund authoritarian regimes in Africa on the basis that they deliver on development. Beyond the obvious concern that donors become complicit in human rights violations, the main question facing authoritarian development in Africa has always been whether the economic gains achieved under repressive rule are sustainable.

if Ethiopia is no longer seen as a success story, then the case for authoritarian development in Africa falls apart. Already, the EU has suspended nearly €90 million ($110 million) in budgetary aid to the country because of concerns over the government’s handling of the conflict in Tigray. Growing evidence that authoritarian politics can have devastating developmental consequences will also give a shot in the arm to organizations like the Westminster Foundation for Democracy that argue that the international community should be doing development democratically.

it has become more common for international donors and aid practitioners to question the value of democracy for development—and to suggest that authoritarian governments that can force through necessary reforms might be more effective in some cases.

even as immigration grows in this traditionally homogenous country, Japan appears to be avoiding the organized far-right backlash that has coursed through the West in recent years

In Europe and the United States, immigration and national identity seemingly consume all politics; in Japan, despite its reputation as closed-off, homogenous, and xenophobic, a large increase in immigration has mostly been met with a shrug. While anti-immigrant sentiments are widespread, they do not run very deep, or so suggests the lack of substantial opposition

In April 2019, Tokyo implemented historic immigration reform, expanding visa programs to allow more than 345,000 new workers to immigrate to Japan over the subsequent five years. Low-skilled workers will be able to reside in Japan for five years, while foreign workers with specialized skills will be allowed to stay indefinitely, along with their family members—suggesting that many of these workers might stay for good

As it torments what before it had appeared as solid, immovable authority, a revolution also contests established knowledge.

a longing is not an act, and a general condition of unhappiness does not predict any specific action

just like regimes, the revolutionary explosion often catches the committed revolutionary by surprise: the teeming masses rose up earlier or later than expected, they moved not by the book and not according to plan, but as a detonation in the normal flow of time.

Masisi’s government has concluded that allowing controlled hunting of elephants — initially a quota of 400 annually will be allowed — will assist the president in retaining power in the country’s October elections without hurting conservation efforts. With somewhere between 130,000 and 160,000 elephants, Botswana has the largest elephant population in Africa and the animals have a significant impact on the nation’s economy. Tourism contributed nearly 12 percent of the country’s GDP in 2017. Hunting brought an eighth of the tourism revenues before the ban, which has grown unpopular among Botswana’s rural inhabitants. A single elephant can destroy a field of crops in a night. And last year, 15 Botswanans were killed by elephants.

The vote share of the BDP, which has ruled the nation since independence in 1966, dipped below 50 percent for the first time in the last national elections in 2014

several regional conservationists and researchers point to evidence from Kenya, South Africa and Botswana itself that suggests that controlled hunting gives local communities an economic incentive to look after their wildlife

The Tenharim indigenous territory lies between two medium-sized towns in Amazonas state, and occupies a total of 1.8 million hectares. It is home to several Amazonian tribes. Deusdimar, of Pakyri, said he has no doubt the fires his tribe is facing are man-made. Trained as a firefighter himself, he said it is clear when a fire is natural, judging in part by where it starts - and these fires are not natural in his view. "This is all due to ambition," he said. Farmers are burning forest to open up farmland and "we are hurt directly and indirectly".

Some members of the Tenharim tribe work as firefighters for Ibama, the national environment agency. This year they for the first time lit fires in parts of their forest in May and June in an effort to control fire risks during the coming dry season. The controlled fires created cleared areas around a few key pieces of forest, home to animals and forest foods crucial to the tribe, they said. The cleared areas have helped prevent the fire situation from being completely out of control this year, the firefighters said. "If we had not done this, the fires would have been be so much worse,"

Indigenous residents said they blame Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil's right-wing president, for undermining the country's environmental agency. Since Bolsonaro took office, Ibama's budget has shrunk by a quarter as part of government-wide belt tightening, according to internal government data collected by the opposition Socialism and Liberty (PSOL) party and shared with Reuters. Among the cuts were funding for prevention and control of forest fires, which saw a budget reduction of 23%, the data showed.

Johnson has long promised that a more vigorous negotiating position than that of his predecessor, Theresa May, would push the EU into offering last-minute concessions on the terms of Britain’s scheduled exit from the union. But according to a senior official source in the U.K. Foreign Office, under Johnson’s administration the U.K.’s Brexit negotiating team has in reality been “completely hollowed out” with “key people reassigned.” Despite Johnson’s promises of new proposals to solve the nearly intractable problem of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in the run-up to a crunch EU summit on Oct. 17, the Johnson team has “nothing remotely new on the table,” the official told Foreign Policy.

While negotiations on May’s withdrawal agreement were going at full tilt in late 2018, the Foreign Office negotiating team numbered over 90 people. With the replacement of May’s top negotiator, Olly Robbins, with David Frost in June, that team has been largely disbanded, with most negotiators transferred to other departments. Frost still holds twice-weekly meetings in Brussels—but “our team is basically being sent [to Brussels] to pretend to negotiate, run down the clock,” says the Foreign Office official. “It’s pretty embarrassing. These are serious people being asked to [participate in] a charade.”

May’s withdrawal agreement—which was humiliatingly rejected by historic majorities in Parliament last winter—took nearly three years to thrash out. Johnson’s timetable would have required the details of a new deal to be drafted and for Parliament to pass it between the summit on Oct. 17 and the scheduled Brexit deadline of Oct. 31.

Political leaders are usually insulated from major health scares by their wealth and access to private health care. But the coronavirus has already impacted leaders across the world

The consequences will be very different in countries where political institutions are weaker and where the illness or death of a leader has been known to generate the kind of power vacuum that might inspire rival leaders, opposition parties, or the military to launch a power grab. This is a particular problem in countries where checks and balances are weak and political parties don’t have strong decision-making mechanisms, which is true in parts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and post-communist Europe

In countries where politics are more personalized, the death of a leader can trigger damaging succession battles that can split the ruling party and, in the worst cases, encourage a military coup

The revolt against the judges in the United States and Poland, and the United Kingdom, and elsewhere, is little or nothing to do with actual cases and judgments. It is instead about removing or discrediting those independent checks and balances which prevent those with executive power from easily getting their way.

attacks on the independent judiciary need to be seen as akin to the attacks on the impartial civil service and and diplomatic service, the free press, public service broadcasting, and those parts of the legislature beyond the executive’s easy grasp

the invocation of heady snappy legitimising phrases (such as the “Will of the People”, “Taking Back Control”, “Get Brexit Done” and “Restoring Sovereignty”) that are intended to over-ride any opposition or concerns

Imagine an empire with a massive security sector, one barely accountable to the democratic will. This coercive system, though appearing self-perpetuating, represents an elite echelon’s efforts to protect and consolidate power. It employs so many people that its maintenance and funding is necessary, not because of the dictates of national security, but simply to keep all its workers from becoming “superfluous.” With a repressive apparatus notorious for its abuses, this security sector fosters the very domestic opposition it is designed to combat.

this description actually comes from George Kennan’s foundational article “The Sources of Soviet Conduct,” which appeared in Foreign Affairs, under the byline X, in 1947. Kennan, perhaps more than anyone else, shaped the rhetoric of the Cold War in a way that made it seem preordained, inevitable. He is most often remembered for calling out the supposedly innate qualities of Russian culture—spiritual deprivation, cynicism, and conformity—upon which communist ideology had been grafted. This combination, he argued, was destined to conflict with the innate qualities of Americanism—its freedom of worship, its emphasis on individuality, and its support of business. But the dominance of the security sector was another persistent motif in Kennan’s work; he dedicated five paragraphs of “The Sources of Soviet Conduct” to the “organs of suppression.” Secret police lurked everywhere, the narrative went, and prisons were the Soviet Union’s primary feature. By 1953, under Joseph Stalin, 2.6 million people were locked up in the gulag and over 3 million more were forcibly resettled— a total of around 3 percent of the population kept under state control. Kennan’s point, like those of other foundational Cold War tracts, was clear: unlike the United States, the Soviet Union was brutally repressive.

The pathway toward the permanent war economy of NSC 68’s vision was not direct. It was contested in Congress and in public opinion. Critics rightly feared the emergence of a “garrison state,” a term that has been largely lost today.

The new coalition appears to have largely seized the agenda and changed the narrative: in recent weeks Italy has softened its stance towards NGO ships asking to disembark the migrants rescued in the Mediterranean, and has cut a temporary deal with other EU members for the relocation of the asylum seekers picked up at sea – an agreement that the government has touted as “historic”, stressing that the adoption of a less adversarial attitude towards Europe than Salvini's is already bearing fruit

The game is not over, and his mid-summer move may still pay off. The new, fragile ruling coalition, whose two main members have despised and insulted each other for years, has been put under further strain by another sudden, tectonic shift in Italy's political landscape.As it turned out, Salvini was not the only one in a mood for political gambling. Mid-September, barely two weeks after the new cabinet had been sworn in, prominent PD member Matteo Renzi announced he was leaving the party to found his own, Italia Viva (Italy Alive). Although Renzi said he (and the roughly 40 MPs and Senators who joined him) would keep supporting the government, the split marks a watershed moment in the history of the Italian centre-left.

Renzi, a charismatic and influential politician whose stint as Prime Minister came to an abrupt end after he lost a constitutional referendum in December 2016, has long been accused by the left of being too centrist, pro-business and socially conservative, and of steering the party away from its social-democratic roots. His reluctance to clearly label himself as left-wing has become somewhat legendary, just like his flair for hot-air rhetoric.