Authoritarian regimes are becoming more pro-active, sophisticated and innovative – in short, so damn clever – at manipulating and censoring media, writes Christopher Walker, director of studies at Freedom House. The freedom watchdog releases its annual global analysis …

Why aren’t today’s democratic dissidents as well-known as the Soviet dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s? The Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby suggests that the superficial character of new media has something to do with it.

Samizdat literature was difficult …

Omar Hassan al-Bashir, the incumbent Sudanese president, has won re-election, claiming 68 percent of the vote in the country’s first elections for a quarter century. But opposition groups and independent observers noted widespread fraud and vote-rigging, while several …

The leader of Egypt’s pro-reform National Association for Change has launched a strong attack on Cairo’s “vicious” regime as part of an unprecedented campaign to mobilize the country’s traditionally disengaged diaspora in support of democratic reform.  

Mohamed ElBaradei, the …

The last time people in Central Asia were talking about exporting revolution, Leon Trotsky was running the Red Army. But some analysts are pondering the possible contagious impact of Kyrgyzstan’s latest uprising.

“Revolution is infectious,” says Roza Otunbayeva, …

However Burma’s forthcoming elections are conducted, the ruling junta’s constitution will perpetuate military rule, a new analysis confirms.

The armed forces will occupy a quarter of parliamentary seats and be given control of three key ministries. They will also retain …

Civil society groups are critical actors in Yemen’s stuttering process of democratic reform. Yet the poverty-ridden country is, some analysts suggest, approaching failed state status and this week’s attempted suicide-bombing assassination of the UK Ambassador to Sana highlights …

Leading figures in Burma’s military junta are swapping their uniforms for civilian clothes in the latest maneuver of the regime’s supposed democratization process.

“So far as I heard, about 20 ministers … and some deputy ministers will officially give up …

As the continuing political crisis in Thailand threatens to come to a violent head, Kavi Chongkittavorn suggests that the media shares some of the responsibility for the country’s poisonous polarization:

It is not wrong to say that the current political …

Freedom and democracy? Forget it. China is going to take over. So argues a character in the Todd Solondz film, Life During Wartime. The notion of a resurgent China appears to be spreading from Sinophile analysts into popular culture …