Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is a crime not just against Ukraine, but against civility and the Russian people themselves, says Dimitri Androssow, a Russian oppositional politician with PARNAS. Read TWU’s striking interview here.
Category: Dictatorship
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was by no stretch of the imagination inevitable, but the factors that culminated in Putin eventually giving his troops the “go” were a long time in the making and include old territorial grievances, more recent Russian concerns about NATO and a healthy dose of authoritarianism. Let’s break down some key facts underlying the invasion.
Poland’s ruling Law and Justice party planned ahead: Some of their first major actions targeted the independence of the courts. Now, there are few ways for citizens to fight more direct attacks on civil society.
By Linus Hoeller, Northwestern University The concept of American decline has been around for about as long as America has been a global power. This is not surprising; when you are at the top, it can seem like the only way to go is down. The United States experienced its unipolar moment following the fall…
Linus Hoeller, Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism Historical overview of the region’s democratization and backsliding When the “communist” dictatorships of Eastern Europe fell, one by one, in 1989 – and, with the exception of Romania, in a remarkably peaceful fashion – western euphoria was great. These countries and their people, newly “liberated” from their…
Photography by Tianxiao Xu Presentation and writing by Linus Hoeller North Korea is closed off from the outside world like no other country. It consistently ranks at the very bottom of freedom indices – no free press, no free elections, no freedom of movement, assembly, speech. For three generations, the Kim dynasty has ruled the…
By Linus Hoeller Title Image: Documents taken from www.nytimes.com Over one million Uighurs have been placed in high-security re-education facilities by Chinese authorities, the United Nations estimate. A Muslim minority of around ten million people in western China’s Xinjiang province, the Uighurs are the target of a systematic campaign by the central government to re-shape…
Eastern Europe has caught up with the west in terms of democracy and economy. But central Asia hasn’t, despite both coming out of the same Soviet system. Why is that?
“Too good to be true”, the Czechoslovak people’s dream of freedom, brought about by liberal reforms of the new 1968 government, came crashing to a dramatic end with the Warsaw Pact invasion of the ČSSR, just half a year after the Prague spring had begun. Though the Soviets’ reaction was forceful, one question remains: was…
Introduction Adolf Hitler’s “Machtergreifung”[1] on the 30th of January 1933 created the foundation for open anti-Semitic violence, which would eventually pave the way into what became known as the holocaust: the “systematic, state-organized persecution and murder of at least six million Jews … by Nazi-Germany”.[2] Antisemitism was nothing new when the NSDAP[3] gained power in…