Sat
Nov
30

State capture is a joint venture, not a solo act: informal networks and democratic state building

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By Veronica Anghel | Bologna

In assessing the state of liberal democracy in contemporary Europe, significant scholarly and public attention has been paid to the role of leaders. Post-Communist countries in particular are often the focus of scholars who announce a ‘democratic backsliding’ engineered by populist ‘strongmen’. This article suggests that in consolidating EU democracies, such attention is disproportionate in reference to the actual de-democratising effect of the emerging ‘strongmen’. It draws attention to the systemic conditions that allow such leaders to surface, and focuses on state capture (the extraction of private benefits from the state by incumbent officeholders) as a joint-venture practice that precedes and outlives individual political lives and acts as a brake on further democratisation.

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Sat
Nov
30

With the Benefit of Hindsight: Lessons from Five Pooled Funds to Support Civil Society

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By Barry Gaberman, Merrill Sovner, and William Moody| New York

The 1990s ushered in an era of widespread governmental support for liberal democracy and an opportunity to build civil society in countries where there had long been a dearth of public space separate from government control. There was optimism bordering on euphoria, and a general belief that liberal democracy was the model of the future. This was an environment in which outside funders saw an opportunity to have an impact and were willing to seize that opportunity, even though their expertise in the region might have been modest in the beginning.

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Sat
Nov
30

A more effective way of tackling institutionalised corruption

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By Silvia Fierăscu| Timișoara

In countries where corruption is an endemic problem, the investigative and intervention strategies being employed to curb the phenomenon at present are not working. Despite the consistent efforts and resources invested into such initiatives, they fail to lower the levels of corruption.

Why is this? It is because, in countries with systemic corruption, we are dealing with institutionalised complex networks of corruption. The current methods used to disrupt them do not address these networks’ organising principles with the right data, conceptual framework or analytical tools.

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Sun
Aug
25

Iran would not lose a war. Everyone would

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By Alec Bălășescu | Hong Kong

When Iran claimed to have downed a US drone for the first time in 2012, an Iranian friend gifted me a new toy bought in Tehran: a plastic, low quality model of the said drone, bearing on its box the inscription in Farsi and in English: “We will crush Amrican (sic!) hegemony!” My friend commented that if they were to use the same technology that produced the toy, the chances of success would be minimal.

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Tue
Aug
20

Israel’s complicated relationship with Europe: between Japheth and Esau

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By Owen Alterman | Tel Aviv

May 2019 featured three major European events. One didn’t even take place in Europe. The first happened on May 9, Europe Day, when European leaders gathered for their summit in Sibiu, Romania. The second: the set of European Parliament elections across the 28 European Union member states. And the third major European event of May 2019 was the Eurovision song contest, which took place not in a quaint Transylvanian mountain town or across the villages and downtowns of the Continent or British Isles, but in a convention center on the edge of Tel Aviv, Israel. In the city’s beachside park, some 500,000 people packed the largest Eurovision village in the history of the competition.

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Tue
Aug
20

The ambivalence of the Zelensky presidency

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By Andreas Umland | Kiev

Many political experts both in and outside Ukraine have reacted negatively or very negatively to the meteoric political rise of Ukrainian comedian Volodymyr Zelensky. Indeed, Zelensky’s presidency could prove problematic in various ways. His 2019-2024 term as Ukraine’s head of state may prove to be an even more ambivalent enterprise than those of the other two top contenders in this year’s presidential elections, the opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko and the former president Petro Poroshenko, would have been. Still, for all the apt scepticism, there is also – as in the case of certain positive aspects of Tymoshenko’s and Poroshenko’s unsuccessful bids for president – a bright side to Zelensky’s victory. One can identify at least three major risky or negative, but also three relatively encouraging dimensions of his rule.

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