Tag: democratic elections
The West Should Stop Doing Global Kleptocrats So Many Favors
All of us have in our mind a cartoon image of what an autocratic state looks like. There is a bad man at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents.
But in the 21st century, that cartoon bears little resemblance to reality. Nowadays, autocracies are run not by one bad guy, but by networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, security services (military, police, paramilitary groups,
Nine Books to Read to Understand the War in Ukraine
Kyiv is burning. I am struggling to explain this to my young children; they know that I wrote a book about the 2013–14 Ukrainian revolution on the Maidan, Kyiv’s central square. They were too small then to understand that their parents’ friends and colleagues were being shot at by snipers. They do know, though, that I dedicated the book to them, “in hope of a better world to come.” And they have had their own experience of post-Maidan Ukraine, playing