Abstract: This essay argues that explanations of democratic backsliding have overlooked a quiet but powerful mechanism: emigration. While economic inequality, cultural backlash, and authoritarian learning all matter, the author contends that the selective departure of a country's most educated, worldly, and democratically inclined citizens reshapes the politics of the places they leave behind. Drawing on Gallup World Poll data spanning some 120 countries, the essay shows that dissatisfaction with governance is among the strongest predictors of the desire to leave. As these citizens exit, liberal opposition coalitions thin, civil society loses organizers and donors, and democratic norms lose their everyday reinforcement—turning "exit" into a substitute for "voice." The result is "democratic drain," a hidden demographic underpinning of authoritarian resilience. Backsliding, the essay concludes, is as much about who leaves as about who remains, and that selective exodus must be treated as politically consequential.
Abstract: This essay argues that philanthropy has made a fundamental error: It funds programs—education, health, climate—while neglecting the freedom that makes those gains durable. Of roughly US$900 billion in annual global giving, the authors note, less than one percent flows to freedom, democracy, and civil liberties; education alone receives more than twenty-five times as much, and even animal welfare attracts more than civil liberties do. The essay reframes this not as a moral shortfall but as a market failure—freedom has been mispriced, treated as a moral preference rather than the productive infrastructure on which every other cause depends. The essay proposes treating freedom as an asset class, with tools to target risk, measure returns ("Freedom Alpha"), and allocate capital across regime types. Raising freedom funding to ten percent of giving over the next decade, the authors conclude, is not idealism but an overdue market correction—and it is up to funders to act.
Abstract: The authors respond to Michael Meyer-Resende's critique by clarifying that they do not endorse strict "vote majoritarianism," and they accept that democracy requires some counter majoritarian institutions to protect rights and the democratic process. Their concern is with institutional designs that systematically enable partisan minorities to thwart or rule over electoral majorities, such as is seen in extreme federal malapportionment, excessive judicial vetoes of ordinary legislation, and plurality systems that convert authoritarian pluralities into "manufactured majorities." In an era of strong ethnonationalist minorities, the authors argue, proportional representation better contains these forces. Safeguarding democracy now requires vigilance against institutions that entrench authoritarian minorities.
Abstract: The essay analyzes Uganda's precarious "late Museveni" period, which is marked by an aging president, extreme personalization of power, and growing militarization. It shows how decision making has shifted from formal institutions to an inner circle centered on Museveni's family, and especially his son, who controls key military structures and openly pursues succession. Rising repression, ethnicized patronage, and the dominance of Western-Uganda elites intensify tensions with marginalized groups such as the Baganda. Looking beyond the 2026 elections, the essay argues that Uganda's transition will likely be shaped by the first family, the army, ethnic dynamics, and regional powers, with significant risks of instability.
Abstract: This essay opens with President Yoon Suk Yeol's stunning six-hour declaration of martial law in South Korea in December 2024 to challenge a comforting assumption: that East Asia's leading democracies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan—have weathered the global wave of backsliding unscathed. Often ranked alongside Europe's consolidated democracies, the three are better understood, the author argues, as "incipient backsliders" exhibiting norm violations that have quietly grown since the early 2010s. Yoon's self-coup, though swiftly crushed, exposed how even a wealthy, democratically committed society remains vulnerable. The deeper threat is polarization, which in South Korea is both the main driver of democratic decay and the chief obstacle to repairing it; Taiwan's fate, meanwhile, hinges on deterring Beijing and on whether the KMT will defend democratic rules under which it increasingly struggles to win. Backsliding demands firmer institutional safeguards and bipartisan resistance to power grabs, the author concludes, before the incipient becomes entrenched.
Abstract: This essay challenges the assumption that political polarization leads naturally to political violence. Surveying cases from ancient Alexandria and the Russian pogroms to lynching in the American South, Hindu-Muslim riots in India, and the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, the essay argues that polarization turns deadly only when several forces converge: when affective hostility fuses with fears of demographic change and political displacement, when groups come to see control of the polity as a matter of collective survival, and when the state retreats from enforcing equal protection. Mass democracy heightens the danger by translating demographic difference into political power. Yet fatalism is unwarranted—most polarized societies remain peaceful, and Charlottesville did not become a pogrom because institutions held. The United States, the essay concludes, is not on an inevitable path to violence so long as its civic order and sense of common membership endure.
Abstract: This essay explains how a party less than two years old toppled Viktor Orbán's Fidesz in Hungary's April 2026 election after sixteen years of autocratization. Beyond the usual explanations—economic discontent, scandals, and Péter Magyar's charisma—the author identifies an underappreciated force: a network of more than 2,500 semi-autonomous local civic groups, the "Tisza Islands," that sprang up within eighteen months and supplied the nationwide campaign capacity the opposition otherwise lacked. Their rise is a puzzle, since Fidesz had deliberately gutted opposition parties and independent civil society. The case carries two lessons: Prodemocracy civic capacity may be latent rather than absent, emerging when participation seems likely to matter; and loosely structured grassroots organization is a powerful model for opposition mobilization. It works best, the author concludes, in competitive authoritarian settings where elections remain unfair but still winnable—less so where bans, fraud, or harsh repression foreclose electoral turnover.
Abstract: This essay argues that the true winner of Iran’s recent war is neither moderation nor democratic change, but the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC). Some observers, including U.S. president Donald Trump, have read the upheaval in Tehran as producing a more reasonable, less radical regime. In fact, the author contends, it marks the culmination of a decades-long transformation. Since its founding in 1979, the IRGC has evolved from revolutionary militia to military force, then to an ideological-security cartel and a “state within the state”—and now, under the pressures of war and a looming succession crisis, into something close to the state itself. Each crisis handed the Guard a new mission, new resources, and greater autonomy. The result is not a softening of the Islamic Republic but its hardening around its most coercive institution. Iran's future, the essay concludes, hinges on whether the IRGC remains cohesive.
Abstract: This essay asks whether Viktor Orbán's electoral defeat can actually restore Hungarian democracy. Péter Magyar—a politician almost unknown three years earlier—won 71 percent of parliamentary seats, a supermajority that on paper lets his Tisza government do whatever it wants. The reality, the author cautions, will be more difficult to confront. After four election cycles of autocratic capture, institutions have been compromised, courts and media reshaped, and democratic habits abandoned; entrenched veto players remain, and the new government inherits a hollowed-out state with empty coffers. Hungary thus joins the ranks of countries attempting a "democratic U-turn," a path that research shows is steep, and Magyar confronts deeper damage than counterparts in Brazil, Poland, or the United States faced. Yet it is never a winning strategy to count Hungarians out.
Abstract: In October 2025, two men were sentenced for an Iranian-directed murder-for-hire plot against the exiled activist Masih Alinejad. Such accountability, the authors argue, remains the exception. As Iran and a growing roster of authoritarian states reach across borders to harass, abduct, and kill exiles and diaspora critics, justice is routinely thwarted by diplomatic immunity, the territorial limits of jurisdiction, and host governments' competing geopolitical interests—as the killing of Jamal Khashoggi illustrates. The authors map these accountability gaps and propose ways to close them: clarifying the extraterritorial reach of human-rights obligations, strengthening UN review mechanisms, and grounding responses in a consistent, country-agnostic approach that prioritizes victims' safety over a perpetrator's strategic weight. If these gaps persist, they warn, democracies will normalize authoritarian repression on their own soil and erode the rule of law.
Abstract: Against the backdrop of a 2026 war scare between Eritrea and Ethiopia, this essay traces the roots of Eritrea's authoritarianism and insists that it was not inevitable. President Isaias Afwerki, in power since 1991, has buried the country's only ratified constitution and rules by personal fiat, unchecked by parliament, courts, free press, or elections. Correcting the common claim that Eritrea has never held a vote, the author—an anthropologist who did fieldwork there during the transition—recovers the democratic experiments the Eritrean People's Liberation Front briefly attempted after independence and then methodically abandoned. The absence of domestic accountability, he argues, is not merely a national tragedy but a structural driver of regional instability: A regime that legitimizes itself through permanent external threat cannot allow that threat to recede. So long as one man can commit Eritrea to war without oversight, he concludes, conflict in the Horn of Africa will recur not by accident but by design.
Abstract: This essay overturns a consensus among scholars and strategists: that only broad, pre-electoral coalitions can unseat dominant parties in competitive authoritarian systems. The evidence is two surprising reversals—Hungary in 2026, where the single Tisza party swept Orbán's Fidesz, and Turkey in 2024, where the Republican People's Party (CHP), running alone, won landmark local elections. In both countries, sprawling opposition fronts had failed badly just a year or two earlier. The authors argue that it was consolidation around a single credible party, and not coalition breadth, that proved decisive—an outcome reached less by design than through contingency. They also stress how context shapes an autocrat's options: EU membership constrained Orbán to keep up legal appearances, while Turkey's strategic leverage gave Erdoğan freer rein for outright repression. Whether Tisza can convert its breakthrough into democratic renewal, and whether the CHP can win nationally amid mounting repression, the authors conclude, remains to be seen.
Abstract: Contemporary repression, this essay contends, is no longer mainly the visible work of censors and jailers; it is networked, algorithmic, and invisible, teaching millions who have never been imprisoned to hesitate and self-censor. Freedom, the author insists, is not an abstraction but a set of concrete capacities—to communicate, move, organize, and connect—that these distributed systems of control quietly strip away before overt repression is ever needed. The response must therefore itself be networked: building resilient, distributed infrastructure that keeps those capacities genuinely accessible. This is not defeatism but a structural argument—leadership and courage still matter yet cannot succeed inside systems an adversary controls. Whoever controls the infrastructure of freedom, the author concludes, will shape the future of democracy.
Abstract: This essay examines what the United States' retreat from international institutions means for the liberal global order. Under both Trump administrations, the authors argue, Washington has embraced a sovereigntist approach—withdrawing from UN bodies and climate and human-rights instruments, and dismantling USAID in 2025—that is hollowing out the multilateral architecture liberal democracy depends on. The likely result is not outright collapse but a fragmented world of overlapping regional orders with weakened universal institutions at the center, a shift that grows harder to reverse the longer it persists. Crucially, the authors insist the case for reengagement does not rest on idealism: International organizations have been among the most effective instruments of U.S. power, and disengagement simply hands their agendas to autocratic rivals. The window for reengagement remains open, they conclude; the question is whether Washington will move before it closes.
Abstract: This essay argues that the effectiveness of China's online censorship springs not from the party-state's bureaucratic capacity but from its ability to coopt market forces. What began as the rumored "fifty-cent army" of idle posters has grown into a profit-making industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, as Chinese Communist Party committees and government agencies outsource digital surveillance and opinion management to private firms. These companies detect "sensitive" words, flood platforms with propaganda, and suppress troublesome posts with a technical precision the state lacks on its own—letting some discussion continue while stopping the rest, and heading off "online mass incidents" before they spill into the streets. The arrangement, the author concludes, does not bode well for dissent: Surveillance is becoming more precise and preemptive, and so long as businesses find it profitable to collaborate, society will struggle to find a counterweight to market-enhanced digital repression.
Abstract: As global illiberalism rises, democratic actors facing autocratization confront dwindling international support, tougher strategic dilemmas, and steeper costs for defending liberal democracy. Tools once central to democratization—such as Western linkages and international organizations—have weakened or now help to entrench illiberalism. These shifts abroad confound resistance at home: they 1) narrow and politicize international support, 2) create damaging credibility gaps, and 3) fragment democratic coalitions. Amid a deficit of liberal oxygen, historical and contemporary experiences suggest we are entering a bootstrapping era—demanding we shift our focus to how democratic resistance endures under global illiberalism through autonomous, locally anchored initiatives.
