The Taipei city hall building is lit up with Pride colours during the annual Taiwan LGBTQ event in Taipei, Taiwan, in October 2021.
(AP Photo/Chiang Ying-ying)
The cancellation of the WorldPride 2025 event in Taiwan is not only a loss for LGBTQ+ rights in Asia. It’s also emblematic of the influence of authoritarian regimes worldwide.
Leaders such as Hungary’s prime minister Viktor Orban and former US president Donald Trump have taken measures that undermine democracy, an expert argues.
Xinhua/Alamy
China is challenging the idea of democracy, but western leaders are eroding democratic rights too.
Trade unions in Mozambique have been weakened due to their proximity to the ruling party, Frelimo.
Photo by Gianluigi Guercia/AFP via Getty Images
Mozambique’s trade unions have not been a strong force in society – which has left a space for others to fill.
Parents take different approaches to raising their kids.
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In some regions of the country, mothers and fathers have different approaches than their counterparts in other regions.
An image of a mock gallows on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, is shown as the House select committee holds hearings in June 2022 into the attack.
(AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
It’s easy to consider the erosion of democratic norms in the U.S. as purely political, but it poses serious risks to the country’s economic order. Is democracy in the gallows?
Noviolet Bulawayo, Zimbabwean writer.
Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images
Playing out in an animal kingdom, Glory is a devastating political commentary on Zimbabwe today.
Former president Donald Trump tosses hats into the crowd before addressing attendees during an event in on July 23, 2022, in Tampa, Fla.
(AP Photo/Phelan M. Ebenhack)
For our societies to survive, we must take action to figure out the psychology behind an attraction to tyrants — or we will be led in the future by fear-mongering, war-mongering tyrannical liars.
Jose Eduardo dos Santos.
epa-efe/Tiago
Dos Santos was a withdrawn president. His silence produced an aura of power and the cult of personality that surrounded him.
Sinister terminology: Russian President Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin last month.AP Photo/, Pool) READ LESS.
Alexander Zemlianichenko/Pool/AP
The Russian president might claim to be confronting hate speech, but he is drawing on the ideas of anti-Semitic extremists
Ethiopian women at a garment factory at the Hawassa Industrial Park in the country’s southern region.
Eyerusalem Jiregna/AFP via Getty Images
In democratic contexts, getting women into work empowers them. In autocracies like Ethiopia’s, this doesn’t hold. We found out why.
Russia has pioneered the concept of digital sovereignty and used it to severely restrict Russians’ access to the internet.
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For more than a decade, the Russian government has been putting teeth into its doctrine of ‘digital sovereignty’ by steadily increasing censorship of content and control over internet access.
The substance of the new bill will make it much more difficult for people like asylum seekers to claim their human rights in the UK.
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An expert on the Human Rights Act explains why the government’s approach has all the hallmarks of authoritarianism.
The new poster boy of left-wing South American politics?
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Colombians go to the polls on June 19 to elect a new president. The vote comes at a delicate time in the country’s politics.
Supporters of a Pakistani religious group burn an effigy depicting the former spokeswoman of India’s ruling party, Nupur Sharma, during a demonstration in Karachi, Pakistan.
AP Photo/Fareed Khan
A scholar of Islam writes about how widespread authoritarianism in the Muslim world shapes governments’ foreign policy toward Muslim minorities abroad.
Politics is the Marcos family business.
Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
Bongbong Marcos is the projected winner of the Philippines election. That the son of a brutal dictator has won shows how wedded the country is to dynastic politics – and image manipulation.
Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro and Donald Trump threw their weight behind industries that are driving climate change.
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A new book lays out the connections between industries and politicians that are both stalling action on climate change and diminishing democracy.
Students chanting slogans during a protest in Johannesburg in 2021.
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South Africans are increasingly dissatisfied with democracy because of its failure to address inequality.
Vladimir Putin receives Marine Le Pen at the Kremlin in Moscow on March 24, 2017.
Mikhail Klimentyev/AFP
A victory of the far-right presidential candidate would be good news for Moscow, which has a long-standing history with Le Pen and her party.
A whites-only beach during apartheid in South Africa.
Photo by Jonathan C. Katzenellenbogen/Getty Images
Peddlers of dangerous ideas regarding the constitution should be reminded of what was done in the name of a legislative majority under apartheid.
To the nationalist right, Vladimir Putin embodies similar qualities to Donald Trump’s: determination, virility and attachment to traditional values.
Kirill Kudryavtsev/AFP
Former US president Donald Trump continues to wield an important influence within the Republican Party. Notwithstanding the war in Ukraine, he and his supporters continue to look up to Vladimir Putin.