by Martin Duffy Uzbekistan, a central Asian nation and former Soviet republic, recently went to the polls. There […]
Category Archive: Asia
By Hamza Khan Several months ago, the Indian-controlled state of Jammu & Kashmir was dissolved by an act […]
By Jeff Fischer August 30 is the 20th anniversary of the voting in East Timor for the country’s […]
By Hashim Pasha At its heart, the Kashmir conflict between India and Pakistan is an environmental conflict, one […]
By Han Wool Jung
Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese (Myanmarese) Nobel Peace prize winner who was under house arrest for pro-democracy activism, came to power as State Counsellor and leader of the National League for Democracy (NLD) in 2016 with a considerably free election. In the beginning, her victory was an auspicious win for the Myanmar democratization process. However, the prolonged ethnic conflict between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority, the Rohingya, has turned into a genocide. In addition, the media, responsible for promoting freedom of information and dispersing injustice done to the Rohingya, is still severely repressed. As shown by recent imprisonment of two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were investigating the brutal violence on the Rohingya, the military is controlling the coverage of the violence. All these have incited international outrage against the Myanmar military and the government, and especially Suu Kyi for not promoting media freedom and attempting to end the vicious cycle of violence and discrimination on the Rohingya.
Mahathir Mohamad, George Wallace, and the 2018 Malaysian election.
Pictured: Dr. Mahathir Mohamad (center), the once-and-future Malaysian Prime Minister greets protestors at an anti-corruption rally in 2016. Photo credit: Reuters.
By Grayson Lewis
Almost no one predicted the 2018 Malaysian election to turn out the way it did. Before the polls closed on the evening of May 9th, the nation’s quasi-authoritarian hybrid regime was ready to almost reflexively claim another victory for its conservative, Malay-chauvinistmandate. This dominant alliance of ethnically-based political parties that had governed the Southeast Asian nation for three generations kept its vice grip on power through some of the most effective methods available: patronage, bribery, media control, and even occasional violence. Much like Mexico in 2000, many knew that the incumbent regime was in for the toughest election it had yet faced, yet practically every clear-eyed observer was sure that the government would weather the storm as it always had done. When it became evident in the early hours of May 10th that the old order had crumbled at the ballot-box overnight, hardly anyone in Malaysia, not the government, the newly elected opposition, or any citizen who had cast a vote truly fathomed the extent of the democratic revolution they had suddenly witnessed in a mere 24 hours.
Photo: Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan leads “Take a Step, Reject Serzh” campaign. (Photo by Yerevantsi via Wikimedia)
By Aleksandra Zaytseva
A day before “Victory Day”, on May 8th, former newspaper editor, MP, and political prisoner, Nikol Pashinyan, was elected interim Prime Minister of Armenia, 59-to-42, in a historic exchange of power. This peaceful cessation of power by those who sought to keep it indefinitely, especially in a former Soviet republic, is undeniably an event to be celebrated. “Your victory is not that I was elected Prime Minister; your victory is that you decided who should be Prime Minister,” Pashinyan said. It is widely lauded as a new velvet revolution with many public figures sending public congratulations. Yet, many Eurasia watchers are uneasy.
By Yufei Zhang.
A Bill Facing Polarization
On December 5th, 2017, Taiwan’s legislature passed a bill of transitional justice, which is following a set of similar policies issued by the governing party—DPP. According to the law, a powerful committee, under the Premier, will be established to investigate thoroughly and, then, re-evaluate Taiwan’s authoritarian past, which covers the end of WWII to the early 1990s. The committee’s primary and controversial missions include opening private archives, re-naming hundreds of streets and institutions after authoritarian figures, and acquiring assets owned by the once-ruling party in the authoritarian period, which, nowadays, is the main opposition party—KMT.
By Yufei Zhang
China’s New Ambition
In November 2017, a major mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party published an op-ed, inciting fierce debate about the political system in China. “China is the biggest and the most successful democracy in the world,” Han Zhen, the head of a top-ranked university in China, stated in that article. “China’s achievements have already broken up the prerogative interpretation of democracy by the West.”
For many people in the West, facts speak for themselves – China has been an authoritarian country for decades, without a single interval. However, this fait accompli turns out to be not so true for those in China, who have received a set of systematic propagandas since childhood. Over decades, the spin doctors in China have led an effort to have ordinary Chinese believe that the political system in China, modified by various prefixes like socialism or people’s republic, has been a “truly democratic one” from the beginning.
By Grayson Lewis
The optics were sub-optimal for British Prime Minister Theresa May as she took to the podium in front of Number 10 Downing Street on a characteristically chilly and rainy London April morning. The wind tossed up her hitherto immaculate bob-cut hair, as passing cars honked loudly over her speech. More than the weather however, it was the content of May’s announcement that caught the attention of a sleepy British public. May confidently, yet very unexpectedly, announced her cabinet’s push for a snap election, to take place in less than two months’ time. This meant that -despite her recent stance up to that point that her government wasn’t seeking to do so- May was intending for British voters nationwide to return to the polls a whole three years ahead of schedule. For many observers who weren’t familiar with British politics, this begged a simple question: Why?
democracyandsociety.net 