Letting Both Sides Speak? Reporting on Authoritarian Regimes in Democratic Media

Anti-fake news lawfare is deepening government control over civil society, undermining information integrity and civil society’s democratic rights. Patterns to this legal repression and related pushback strategies in South and Southeast Asia are examined, as the forerunners of global developments.

This Working Paper analyses the nature and effects of sanctions pressure imposed on authoritarian regimes, reviews mechanisms of how economic and diplomatic restrictions work, and examines authoritarian targets’ attempts to engage in pressure proofing.

The unification of the opposition under María Corina Machado is an unprecedented political challenge for the regime of Nicolás Maduro. To eliminate candidates and splinter the opposition, the regime weaponises the judiciary and persecutes political enemies, making free and fair elections unlikely.

It is not only non-democratic regimes that resort to authoritarian practices. They can increasingly be found in use also in formally democratic states, as the examples of shrinking civic space, populism, and democratic backsliding show.

After the Arab uprisings, Tunisia would emerge as the only Arab democracy. President Kais Saied’s July 2021 coup has, however, led to the autocratisation of the state. This GIGA Focus traces Saied’s base of support, his strategies, and rhetoric, as well as their implications for Tunisia’s future.

How do autocrats communicate everyday acts of repression? This paper introduces and analyses a novel dataset on justifications for incidents of repression in Morocco and Tunisia during the years 2000–2010, showing that the chosen forms thereof influence how officials subsequently talk about them.

Anti-fake news lawfare is deepening government control over civil society, undermining information integrity and civil society’s democratic rights. Patterns to this legal repression and related pushback strategies in South and Southeast Asia are examined, as the forerunners of global developments.

This Working Paper analyses the nature and effects of sanctions pressure imposed on authoritarian regimes, reviews mechanisms of how economic and diplomatic restrictions work, and examines authoritarian targets’ attempts to engage in pressure proofing.

The unification of the opposition under María Corina Machado is an unprecedented political challenge for the regime of Nicolás Maduro. To eliminate candidates and splinter the opposition, the regime weaponises the judiciary and persecutes political enemies, making free and fair elections unlikely.