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Articles on Authoritarianism

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Members of a medical assistance team from Jiangsu province at a ceremony marking their departure after participating in the fight against Covid-19 in Wuhan, March 19, 2020. STR/AFP

Debate: How Beijing is trying to save face in the global fight against Covid-19

China is seeking to present itself as a model in the fight against the coronavirus – even if it means rewriting the history of the crisis and discrediting the governance of liberal democracies.
A train attendant in Nanchang, China, gestures in solidarity with medical staff departing for the city of Wuhan, Feb. 13, 2020. STR/AFP via Getty Images

Coronavirus unites a divided China in fear, grief and anger at government

Public criticism of the Chinese government’s handling of coronavirus shows that the Chinese people can overcome both strict censorship and a gaping class divide when they get angry enough.
Pakistani Islamists march to protest the Supreme Court lenient treatment of Asia Bibi, a Christian Pakistani woman accused of blasphemy, in Karachi, Feb. 1, 2019. ASIF HASSAN/AFP via Getty Images

Execution for a Facebook post? Why blasphemy is a capital offense in some Muslim countries

Pakistan, Iran and Saudi Arabia all punish blasphemy harshly – even with death. Such laws have political as well as religious motives, says a scholar on Islamism: They’re a tool for crushing dissent.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky speaks to the media with members of the Senate Republican leadership, Oct. 29, 2019. AP/Jacquelyn Martin

What the Roman senate’s grovelling before emperors explains about GOP senators’ support for Trump

The Roman senate declined from a long-held position of authority under the Roman Republic to become almost wholly reliant on the whims of a given emperor, writes a classics scholar.
Two autocrats: Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, left, and Hungarian leader Viktor Orban, right, in Budapest, Hungary, Nov. 7, 2019. AP/Presidential Press Service

So you want to be an autocrat? Here’s the 10-point checklist

Today’s autocrats rarely use brute force to wrest control. A human rights and international law scholar details the modern authoritarian’s latest methods to grab and hold power.
Zambian President Edgar Lungu’s increasingly repressive government uses colonial-era laws to silence dissent. EFE-EPA/ EPA/Phillipe Wojazer

How colonial rule predisposed Africa to fragile authoritarianism

The unstable authoritarian pathway that many post-colonial African states followed was facilitated by the way in which European empires undermined democratic elements within African societies.
Mohammed Morsi, a member of the controversial Islamist political organization the Muslim Brotherhood, was Egypt’s first democratically elected president. He was overthrown in a coup in 2013 and died on trial this June. Reuters/Amr Dalsh

How two Islamic groups fell from power to persecution: Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s Gulenists

A few years ago, Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Turkey’s Gulenists were running the show. Now both religious movements face political repression. How did they fall so far, so fast?
Mayor of Istanbul Ekrem Imamoglu of the main opposition Republican People’s Party, on June 27, several days after his election. REUTERS/Kemal Aslan

Erdoğan’s control over Turkey is ending – what comes next?

Turkey’s authoritarian leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, was handed a big defeat recently when his party’s candidate lost a crucial election contest. Is this the beginning of Erdogan’s demise?

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