Little was initially known on November 4, when Ethiopian federal forces invaded their own region, as the events were transpiring. The country’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed shut off internet access to the people of Tigray, a region in northern Ethiopia along the border of Eritrea, and cut off their communication with the outside world as his troops engaged in conflict with the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (T.P.L.F), the region’s ruling faction. The intelligence that has come to light three months after the conflict began provides damning details about the suffering endured both by the residents of Tigray and by the swathes of Eritrean refugees present in the region. Horrifying as may be Ethiopia’s incursion against the people of Tigray, especially shocking is that the nation’s leaders invited Eritrean military forces to join them in the oppression of its own citizens. The seeds for Ethiopia’s invasion of the Tigray region were […]

Over the past five years, a resurgence of far-right rhetoric in the United States and Europe has altered the political landscape in the self-proclaimed Western world. Internet activity, especially on platforms such as Facebook, has encouraged echo chambers, leading many further right, extremizing views and encouraging political action. One such party, the Alternative for Deutschland (AfD) was formed in 2013 by Alexander Gauland as a Eurosceptic movement rejecting liberalism. For its first round of election, the party failed to find enough support to unseat any existing members of the German parliament. The AfD found it’s gold mind of support after the Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel,’s 2015 decision to allow over one million undocumented refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) to enter into Germany. It quickly transitioned into an anti-Islamic party, one that trivialized the Holocaust and found a base in reviling immigrants. Capitalizing on the influx […]

On March 1st, former French President Nicolas Sarkozy was sentenced to three years on charges of corruption and influence peddling. Sarkozy was president of France from 2007 to 2012.  Uncovered during a campaign finance investigation against him, Sarkozy was accused of attempting to illegally peddle information from a magistrate Gilbert Azibert by offering the magistrate a prestigious position in Monaco over a phone call. Though Azibert never received the position, the nature of the conversations being a “clearly stated promise” places it under France’s strict corruption laws, which are suggested to be the blueprint for EU-wide corruption policies.. Magistrate Gilbert Azibert was also found guilty and sentenced to two years in prison. At the time of the accusation, Sarkozy was already being investigated over claims that he received illegal payments from the cosmetics company L’Oréal’s heiress Liliane Bettencourt during his 2007 presidential campaign. The prosecution states that Sarkozy attempted to […]

For the past two decades, the socialist party PSVU has run the Venezuelan government. Initially controlling only the executive branch, the PSUV consolidated control of the judiciary, electoral council, and now the legislative body. Since the transition from the Chávez regime to Nicolás Maduro’s government, the Venezuelan economy has collapsed and prompted an exodus, largely into Colombia. A prime example of a decaying petrostate, Venezuela has fallen prey to “Dutch disease”, when a government is heavily dependent on natural resource exports, oil and fossil fuels in this case and there is little funding to other sectors. Additionally, power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and corruption is rampant in every level of the political and economic structure. The economic collapse under Maduro is due to the decrease in the outflow of oil, leaving the country with little income. With hyperinflation skyrocketing and many Venezuelans worried about putting food […]

Russia’s premier dissident, Alexei Navalny, was sentenced to serve three years in prison earlier this February. As Vladimir Putin’s most prominent political opponent, Mr. Navalny has spent the past 20 years exposing corruption and organizing anti-establishment protests. The latest ruling against Mr. Nalvany hails from a long string of attempts from Moscow to silence anti-establishment forces, ranging from a potentially state-sanctioned poisoning attempt to allegations of embezzlement and fraud. It also sparked the largest day of protest in Russia since 2017 and subsequently one of the country’s most severe crackdowns on civil liberties in recent memory. The Kremlin has moved swiftly to crack down on the freedom of assembly, dissident fundraising, and civil protections from law enforcement. Human rights watchdogs noted that an estimated 10,000 were arrested nationwide over the two weekend rallies alone, marking the most aggressive wave of detentions since Vladimir Putin’s election in 2000. Moreover, Russian activists […]

Google is threatening to cancel their Google Search services in Australia in response to Canberra’s new law proposal. The proposed Treasury Laws Amendment (News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) Bill 2020 is intended to help local news publishers by having media giants like Google and Facebook compensate news outlets through paying license fees for using their journalistic content on their platforms. The proposed laws are specifically in response to Google and Facebook displaying news articles without paying the news publishers. The consequences of this proposed law will be immense for all parties involved as Google has a 94.45% search engine market share in Australia. Their next competitor is Bing with only 3.63% as of January 2021. Meanwhile, 39% of Australians use Facebook as their general news source, according to the University of Canberra’s Digital News Report 2020. If passed, the law would have news outlets privately or collectively come […]

In a stunning setback for Myanmar’s young democratic government and to the chagrin of international democracies, the country’s military performed a successful coup d’état on February 1, 2021. The de facto leader of Myanmar Aung San Suu Kyi and several members of her National League for Democracy Party were detained by the military, as the military’s top general Min Hlaing Aung then took over Kyi’s post. In response to the overthrow of a government with strong approval from the people, enraged protestors have flooded the streets of Yangon—Myanmar’s largest city—and various other major cities throughout the country. Suu Kyi’s NLD Party won 83% of the vote in a landslide election; however, the military claims that the election was tainted by voter fraud. Military officials took the dramatic step of a coup, therefore, out of a supposed concern for the integrity of the election. Although the country is racked with fury […]

From America’s ‘Summer of Racial Reckoning’ to Hong Kong’s tenacious struggle against legislation sponsored by pro-Beijing officials, protests have been a permanent hallmark of a changing political landscape. In India, the world’s most populous democracy, protestors are clashing against the central government to repeal a set of market-oriented, deregulatory farm laws. The conflict, now in its sixth month, has received international support from celebrities and activists ranging from pop-icon Rihanna to climate change activist Greta Thunberg. The Modi government is under increasing scrutiny for its ongoing crackdown on civil liberties, from free speech to internet access. Prime Minister Modi has not been shy of implementing harsh measures to quell dissent, most notably in supporting the Hindu Nationalist conflict in Kashmir and Jammu. Understanding how the protests arrived at this moment, and how the conflict will resolve, are critical to assessing the health of India’s liberal democracy today. The Farmers’ Produce […]

Since China first hoisted its flag on the soil of Hong Kong in 1997, the former British colony has suffered a downward spiral away from autonomy; its citizens have been stripped of democratic rights and found themselves increasingly subject to the whims of the authoritarian mainland government. Prominent among a recent string of Beijing’s power displays was the mass arrest of 53 people by the Hong Kong police on January 6, 2021, an action taken under the authority of a relatively new national security law—officially named the Law of the People’s Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region—that the Chinese government enacted last June. Police notably cited this controversial law last December when they charged the Hong Kong media tycoon Jimmy Lai with “colluding with foreign forces and endangering national security.” The foreign ministers of the United States, Canada, the UK, and Australia, […]