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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.

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.

All it really says with certainty is four things. The first is that we do not know what will happen if we hard-Brexit. The second is that we can be sure that some consequences will be very uncomfortable, at least for a while. The third is that there is no known solution to the Irish border issue, whatever Conservative politicians wish to claim. And the last, and perhaps the most significant, is that whatever happens the uncertainty of Brexit will continue for a considerable time to come: any deal only leads to more negotiation. No deal just makes that next step harder, and potentially more drawn out.

both major parties offer more delay, prevarication, and long term uncertainty as their core election offering

Yellowhammer can be used to predict all that. All it says is we’re in a mess. What some parties will be able to offer is a certain way out of that mess. The only way to achieve that is to stay in the EU, and reform it, which I believe possible, because there is no human made institution incapable of being reformed: to claim otherwise is, very politely, to be absurd.

Policymakers who face unfamiliar challenges often turn to the past. The problem is they don’t see the messy questions that historians do but, instead, a warehouse of analogies providing easy answers. That seductive simplicity can lead them badly astray.

The actual events of the Chernobyl disaster that took place 35 years ago have been transmuted into a fable about how the revelation of a calamity can undermine an authoritarian regime. That story has led to a ceaseless search for how any disaster in an authoritarian system opposed to the United States presages the imminent defeat of U.S. adversaries from within. It’s an analogy that instructs U.S. policymakers of the fragility of other systems and the inherent superiority of their own. In doing so, it absolves them of any need to shore up the foundations of their own system or prepare for long-term coexistence with a resilient authoritarian rival.

If Soviet collapse was not inevitable or if we can attribute it to factors other than legitimacy or calamity, then the political importance of Chernobyl recedes. What becomes more important, then, is not the roots of instability in authoritarian countries per se but how political systems of any stripe grow brittle or susceptible to collapse—a lesson one would think Americans have learned from the past several years. Indeed, as nonprofit organization Freedom House notes, at the moment, it is contemporary democracies, not autocracies, that seem to be on the waning side as the world enters the 15th consecutive year of democratic recession.

The rise of authoritarian right-wing governments has tended to be viewed as a phenomenon confined to the countries on Europe’s eastern ‘peripheries’. This view is derived from an assumption that political authoritarianism is spreading westwards from eastern Europe, potentially destabilising the political democracies in the west. This account is erroneous in two ways

Once in power the right-wing governments in Hungary and Poland began to dismantle many of the checks and balances of the liberal democratic system. This has included such things as gaining control of the courts (including the Constitutional Court), politicising the public media, and partially reducing the independent functioning of NGOs. Simultaneously they have adopted a nationalist ideology, replete with hostility towards groups such as refugees and the LGBT community. The governments of Fidesz and the Law and Justice Party have partly allied with and contained far-right parties and movements, adopting many of their policies and rhetoric.

Fidesz (partly due to Hungary’s electoral system) has had a constitutional majority in parliament, allowing it to push its reform programme further than its counterparts in Poland

Vietnam seems to be the consensus pick for winner of the U.S.-China trade war, as Chinese and other manufacturers shift production to the cheaper Southeast Asian nation. If there’s a loser, at least in terms of missed opportunities, it may be the countries of South Asia.

African countries, too, are making manufacturing a top priority. Ethiopia alone has opened nearly a dozen industrial parks in recent years and set up a world-class government agency to attract foreign investment. The World Bank has lauded sub-Saharan Africa as the region with the highest number of reforms each year since 2012.

The only proven pathway to long-lasting, broad-based prosperity has been to build a manufacturing sector linked to global value chains, which raises productivity levels and creates knock-on jobs across the whole economy

18 October marks the 35th week of mass demonstrations involving millions of people in cities across Algeria. It follows a week of even larger marches, by students, workers and the general population for democracy, against repression of young people in the protests, against corruption and that an illegitimate parliament is now attempting to debate laws such as the Hydrocarbon Bill.

Upon the trigger of President Bouteflika’s decision to stand for a fifth mandate, violating the constitution, following Friday prayers, millions of Algerians took to the streets to demonstrate for democracy –breaking a wall of fear against protest.And they have occupied that space ever since.

Every Friday since that date, millions of Algerians have marched in every city of the country. Every Tuesday millions of students have marched. And every week, concessions and reforms have been made in response.

There’s an undeniable voyeuristic frisson of seeing a man who once commanded a superpower hawking pizza

BBDO Chairman Philip Dusenberry insisted that the agency’s advertisements be cinematic in their quality. The Gorbachev production lived up to that standard. Informed estimates put the commercial’s budget in the low millions of dollars. Darbyshire, who wrote the script in English, went through three translators to get the right level of idiomatic Russian. To capture the beautiful establishing shots of Red Square and its domed churches, the crew hefted the film cameras high atop the Kremlin itself. And somehow the production managed to get the whole square shut down for the entire shoot.

In 1991, the heads of the former Soviet republics had voted to give Gorbachev a pension of 4,000 rubles per month—but it was not indexed to inflation. By 1994, according to Meduza, his pension was worth less than $2 a month.

Analysis of results by the Electoral Reform Society shows the Conservatives would have won 77 fewer seats under the regional list proportional representation method of voting. While Labour would have won 10 more seats and the Greens another 11, the Liberal Democrats would have been the biggest beneficiaries by taking 59 more seats.

“No government should be able to win a big majority on a minority of the vote,” Darren Hughes, chief executive of the Electoral Reform Society. “Something is very clearly wrong.” He added: “Westminster’s voting system is warping our politics beyond recognition and we’re all paying the price. “Under proportional voting systems, seats would more closely match votes, and we could end the scourge of millions feeling unrepresented and ignored.”

More than 860,000 people voted for the Greens and just over 640,0000 cast their ballots for the Brexit Party. But the Greens will only have one MP in Caroline Lucas, while Nigel Farage’s party did not win a single seat.

between 2015 and 2017 support for Britain’s main parties became much more predicated on issues of culture and identity, reflecting a radical change in how parties attract voters. This shift may lead to a restructuring of the UK party system and the end of traditional party allegiances

Is the country once again experiencing the kind of left-right schism that we saw during the first 25 years after World War II with a choice for voters between a left-wing Labour Party and a right-wing Conservative Party and very little else?

political competition in Britain is defined by two underlying dimensions: one economic dimension, which corresponds to the economic notion of left versus right, and one cultural dimension. This cultural dimension incorporates a range of social issues such as equal opportunities for minorities and the desirability (or not) of the death penalty, as well as a number of issues closely related to globalisation, such as immigration, foreign aid and European integration. This dimension, sometimes referred to as “open” versus “closed”, pits patriotic, Eurosceptic social conservatives against cosmopolitan liberals and by 2017 seemed to be stronger and more coherent in terms of ordering voters’ political orientations than the economic dimension. This suggests that the economic conflict between capital and labour that defined political competition in the 20th century is giving way to a new sort of conflict based on culture and identity.

What makes democracy resilient is its acceptance that we the people, and by extension our governments, are imperfect. The separation of powers between executive, legislature, and judiciary are there to keep the debate continuous, rights protected, and imperfect governments honest as they pursue their current mandate. In totalitarian systems, by contrast, the governing regime justifies itself by a supposedly ‘scientific’ blueprint. The law is reduced to an instrument for the fulfilment of that blueprint.

Since the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979, successive governments of New Right and New Left have attempted to implement an asserted science of government based on the radical, free-market neoclassical economics of the Virginia and Chicago Schools: neoliberalism

Its dominant idea: that markets are always more efficient; the private is morally and functionally superior to the public

the British Political Tradition has been increasingly challenged by contemporary developments. Previously, we focused on 3 challenges: the Scottish question; the European question, culminating in Brexit; and the rise of anti-politics, perhaps better seen as a decline of trust in the political elite. We also emphasized that the British political elites’ response to those challenges was, almost inevitably, to defend the British Political Tradition; although this response was, at best, problematic.

Executive view has persisted, as, at every stage, it has tried to limit the role of Parliament in the Brexit process

The claim of the Executive, and many others, is that the referendum showed the ‘will of the people’, thus giving democratic legitimacy to the decision to leave the EU. In contrast, the claim of a large number, probably a small majority, of MPs is that, in a representative democracy, Parliament should have the final say, although for many of these MPs any decision should respect the referendum vote

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. 

Egypt’s new folk hero likes fast cars, acting, film producing, real estate developing.

Saudi Arabia said on Saturday it would issue fines for 19 offences related to public decency, such as immodest dress and public displays of affection, as the Muslim kingdom opens up to foreign tourists.

a visa regime allowing holidaymakers from 49 states to visit one of the world’s most closed-off countries

Violations listed on the new visa website also include littering, spitting, queue jumping, taking photographs and videos of people without permission and playing music at prayer times

the sense of relief, joy and pride Egyptians felt over their success. The dredger and a fleet of tug boats had worked day and night to unclog one of the world’s most important waterways, eventually refloating the Ever Given in a week — Egyptian can-do beat the expectations of experts who predicted it would take twice as long.

served as a reminder of how much of their potential is stymied by a political economy that deters experimentation, punishes innovation and ultimately pushes many Egyptians to seek opportunities abroad

Centered on a bigotry of low expectations is the idea that Egyptian workers are uniquely unimaginative and unindustrious, and that these traits — rather than the greed and grift of their rulers — are to blame for the country’s economic failings.

Tunisia faced its biggest crisis in a decade of democracy on Monday after President Kais Saied ousted the government and froze the activities of parliament, a move his foes labelled a coup that should be opposed on the street.

after a day of protests against the government and the biggest party in parliament, the moderate Islamist Ennahda, following a spike in COVID-19 cases and growing anger over chronic political dysfunction and economic malaise

huge crowds gathered in his support in Tunis and other cities, cheering, dancing and ululating while the military blocked off the parliament and state television station

The pride and pomp of the British in the heyday of empire did not last long. Two world wars impoverished the country and destroyed its empire. (Our 'special relationship' with the USA consisted in getting desperately needed aid during the Second World War in return for a promise to dismantle the empire. Even if the UK could have maintained the empire, which it could not, as proved by Suez, it in effect traded the empire for survival in the 1940s.)

Entry to the EEC/EU saved the country's economy and saw it flourish, and offered a new and significant role as one of the big three states in one of the big three blocs in the emerging new post-Cold War world, alongside the USA and China

British self-congratulation in the first decade of the 21st century had given a group of people in our political order - a fifth column from the past - the feeling that now was the time to reassert what they mythologised as the spirit of Britain in Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee