Further to yesterday’s link to the excellent Radio Free Europe/radio Liberty blog, Democracy Digest readers may be interested to learn of the other blogs RFE/RL are running:

        Watchdog: Human rights, civil society, and press freedom …

A new agency, modeled on the National Endowment for Democracy, should be established to restore U.S. standing in the world, a new report on public diplomacy concludes. Like the NED, the USA-World Trust would be governed by a non-partisan …

The incoming administration is not short of advice on how to rescue democracy promotion, how liberals should spread liberal democracy internationally and how it can reinvent U.S. leadership in a networked world.

But liberals are “less excited …

The opposition’s significant gains in Venezuela’s state and local elections may represent a real political watershed and have likely dealt a decisive blow to President Hugo Chávez‘s plans for indefinite rule. The results mean that opposition forces will “now …

Over at the indispensable RFE-RL, Brian Whitmore reports that the financial crisis is “sending tremors through Russia’s fragile social contract“:

And in a sign that things could really get dicey soon, the crisis is now taking its toll on …

Authoritarian petro-states were riding high earlier this year, enjoying record receipts from oil revenues which provided the basis for securing domestic political support through rising living standards, as in Russia, or subsidies and patronage, as in Iran and Venezuela. The …

Ukraine’s squabbling political elite is undermining the country’s international reputation, jeopardizing prospects of NATO membership and playing into the hands of its Russian detractors. Despite the political stasis, the European Commission plans to recognize the “European aspirations” of …

A former ally of Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili founded a new opposition party yesterday on the fifth anniversary of the Rose Revolution. Several thousand attended the founding congress of the new party, Democratic Movement-United Georgi, led by Nino Burjanadze, although …

Suggestions that the incoming U.S. administration might abandon a Freedom Agenda that “overpromised and underperformed” may be unnecessarily alarmist. But the Washington Post cautions that while welcoming more humility, caution and realism in foreign policy, “abandoning the promotion and …

The recent G20 summit confirmed the global shift in the balance of power from West to East and highlighted the financial muscle that underpins authoritarian political regimes from Russia to Saudi Arabia. But China, notes one analyst, remains in a …