Addressing issues of democracy, dictatorship, corruption and poverty, our scholars and practitioners produce expert research and train civil society activists around the world.
Research Spotlight
Global Populisms and Their Challenges
A white paper by the Stanford Global Populisms Project finds that established mainstream political parties are the key enablers of populist challenges—and the key solution.
Today, free and fair elections, the primary expression of democratic will for collective government, are far from guaranteed in many countries around the world. Protecting them will require a new set of policies and actions from technological platforms, governments, and citizens.
Francis Fukuyama argues that sustaining democracy will require rebuilding the legitimate authority of the institutions of liberal democracy, while resisting those powers that aspire to make nondemocratic institutions central.
A study examining the BRI through the lens of the obsolescing bargain to evaluate the practices of China’s state-owned enterprises (SOEs) and policy banks in mitigating political risk.
Repression research examines the causes and consequences of actions or policies that are meant to, or actually do, raise the costs of activism, protest, and/or social movement activity. The rise of digital and social media has brought substantial increases in attention to the repression of digital activists and movements and/or to the use of digital tools in repression, which is spread across many disciplines and areas of study. We organize and review this growing welter of research under the concept of digital repression by expanding a typology that distinguishes actions based on actor type, whether actions are overt or covert, and whether behaviors are shaped by coercion or channeling. This delineation between broadly different forms of digital repression allows researchers to develop expectations about digital repression, better understand what is “new” about digital repression in terms of explanatory factors, and better understand the consequences of digital repression.
In Strategy in the Contemporary World, edited by John Baylis, James J. Wirtz, and Jeannie L. Johnson, Oriana Skylar Mastro examines the evolution of Chinese grand strategy from Mao Zedong to Xi Jinping, its drivers, and its implications.
The Project on Middle East Political Science partnered with Stanford University’s Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law and its Global Digital Policy Incubator for an innovative two week online seminar to explore the issues surrounding digital activism and authoritarianism. This workshop was built upon more than a decade of our collaboration on issues related to the internet and politics in the Middle East, beginning in 2011 with a series of workshops in the “Blogs and Bullets” project supported by the United States Institute for Peace and the PeaceTech Lab. This new collaboration brought together more than a dozen scholars and practitioners with deep experience in digital policy and activism, some focused on the Middle East and others offering a global and comparative perspective. POMEPS STUDIES 43 collects essays from that workshop, shaped by two weeks of public and private discussion.
This essay is a part of an exchange based on Francis Fukuyama’s “Making the Internet Safe for Democracy” from the April 2021 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
