Blog post archive

Wednesday, 28 Dec 2022
What Can Somalia’s Federal Member States Learn from Somaliland as They Transition to Multiparty Elections?

Democratisation in the territories of the former ‘Somali Republic’ is influenced by the experience with the 1960s elections. After independence, the Somali republic adopted a parliamentary democracy. However, this democracy was short lived as elections became fraught with malpractices such as rigging, fraud, intimidation, and manipulation. … many Somalis welcomed ...

Thursday, 8 Dec 2022
Civil Society Faces an Uphill Struggle to Defend Democracy

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski, the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, and the Russian human rights organization Memorial for their promotion of “the right to criticize power and protect the fundamental rights of citizens.” This year’s prize constitutes ...

Tuesday, 22 Feb 2022
Democracy Works, Even in Weak States

Political scientists have long assumed that a strong state is a prerequisite for a well-functioning democracy. Recent research suggests that this assumption is wrong. “Building a modern democratic state in Afghanistan where the government’s writ runs uniformly throughout the country implies a timeframe of many years, indeed decades,” wrote the ...

Wednesday, 4 Aug 2021
Hong Kong Two Years After the Mass Protests: What’s Next?

In 2019, millions of Hong Kong citizens took to the streets to protest a proposed bill that would allow Hong Kong authorities to extradite suspected criminals to mainland China. The protests soon developed into a movement, demanding full universal suffrage, amnesty of arrested protestors, and an independent inquiry to investigate police brutality. Known as the Anti-Extradition Law Amendment Bill (Anti-ELAB) ...

Tuesday, 12 Jan 2021
The United States Must Be Viewed as a Flawed Democracy at Significant Risk of Transitioning into Dictatorship

A study of flawed democracies and semi-dictatorships describes a common pattern of events as follows: After having lost an election, the sitting president claims that the election was invalid, whereupon he attempts a coup d’état and his supporters storm the parliament. A few years ago, this sequence of events would ...

Wednesday, 30 Dec 2020
Which Countries Win (and Lose) When We Add Democracy to the Human Development Index?

The UNDP’s Human Development Index (HDI) is a major achievement. It has focused the world’s attention on the human aspects of development, highlighting and featuring not just economic gains but also schooling and education and life expectancy. In this, it was a hugely important corrective for a development community that ...

Friday, 4 Sep 2020
Can Mali’s democracy wait?

Mali cannot afford another rushed and destabilizing election process. Sustaining and strengthening international cooperation should be the first priority, even if this implies a temporary military regime. No surprise, but very inconvenient Mali’s recent coup – the third in three decades – came as no surprise. An escalating civil war, ...

Thursday, 26 Mar 2020
Preventing a Catastrophic COVID Crisis in America

COVID-19 is the most severe pandemic since 1918. Beyond the harrowing humanitarian costs, large-scale economic disruptions are underway that can lead to crisis and conflict. The epidemiological advice is clear: flatten the curve, whatever it takes. Any society presented with the choice between world war-levels of casualties and temporary disruptions ...

Friday, 18 Oct 2019
What "Chernobyl" Teaches Us About the Superiority of Democracy

Authoritarian structures made Chernobyl an unavoidable accident. The HBO series “Chernobyl” has garnered rave reviews all over the world. Norwegian newspapers have been almost unanimous in their praise of the series. And with good reason. This is television drama at its very best. One largely overlooked aspect of the series ...

Tuesday, 3 Apr 2018
Popular Anti-Immigration Movements – and the Response of Democracy

All across Europe, we see growing opposition to immigration. Tough measures imposed by governments are limiting immigration but are not having the same effect on opposition to immigration. Mounting polarization is putting Europe’s democracies as well as European cooperation to the test. I recently visited Warsaw, and then travelled on ...

Friday, 17 Nov 2017
Zimbabwe: from Coup to Democratization?

In the early hours of the morning on 15 November, the Zimbabwean military placed President Mugabe under house arrest. The coup against one of the longest serving rulers in Africa appears to have been a reaction to Mugabe’s ouster of his vice-president Emmerson Mnangagwa, to pave the way for his ...

Tuesday, 21 Mar 2017
Trump and Threats to Truth, Democracy and Peace

Stein Tønnesson delivered this year’s The Fjord Memorial Lecture  at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, Lillehammer. The lecture discusses Trump’s team of advisors, calls for fighting the increasing use of lies in political campaigning, sees Trump’s election as having weakened democracy worldwide, and perceives a major risk to world ...

Tuesday, 15 Nov 2016
Democratic Intervention?

Donald Trump has made statements sceptical of military interventions in the Middle East. This is perhaps a rare piece of good news. Military intervention as a means of building democracy has once again become a hot topic. The Norwegian government has been criticized due to the consequences of the intervention ...

Tuesday, 28 Jun 2016
The Right to Decide: Exit and Basque Self-Determination

Five years ago, the Basque militant group ETA (Basque Homeland and Freedom) announced a unilateral and permanent cessation of operations. Since then, the disappearance of political violence has given rise to a new debate on Basque nationhood: more inclusive, more open, more civic, and at the same time stronger in ...

Monday, 30 May 2016
The ‘Sovereign’ according to Ola Tunander

On Friday 27 May 2016, PRIO celebrated Ola Tunander’s 30-year academic career with a seminar on ‘Sovereignty, Subs and PSYOPS’, and a reception. The celebration was, of course, focused on Ola and his work, spanning topics from the geopolitics and organic state theory of Rudolf Kjellén to the 27 October ...

Thursday, 10 Mar 2016
From the House of Cards to House of Data?

The fourth season of the Netflix series House of Cards was released worldwide on the 4th March. Which is to say, the week-end when many International Relations (IR) researchers are still rushing to finalize their conference paper for the annual convention of the International Studies Association (ISA). And, if you ...

Monday, 14 Dec 2015
Is it Strange that Dictators Hold Elections?

Why do dictators hold elections that merely play to the gallery? On 11 October, Alexander Lukashenko was re-elected as president of Belarus with an impressive 84 per cent share of the vote. The election was anything but free and fair. According to the OSCE, Belarusian law makes it impossible for ...

Wednesday, 4 Nov 2015
Are Myanmar's Monks Hindering Democratization?

The upcoming general elections in Myanmar raise the question of religion’s role in democratisation processes. Previously Buddhism has been an important force in favour of democracy, but in the 2015 election campaign strong Buddhist forces are supporting the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP). This is their democratic right, ...

Thursday, 22 Oct 2015
Can an Economic Boom Ensure Peaceful Elections in Côte d’Ivoire?

On Oct. 25, Ivorians head to the polls for their first presidential election since the disputed 2010 election that left more than 3,000 dead and more than 500,000 displaced. Despite the previous electoral violence and a decade of civil war and political turmoil from 2000-2010, most discussion before this election ...

Monday, 10 Aug 2015
Institutional Characteristics and Regime Survival: Why Are Semi-Democracies Less Durable than Autocracies and Democracies?

In Zaïre (currently DR Congo) in 1991, the country’s personalist ruler Mobutu Sese Seko faced popular unrest, army mutinies, and shrinking resources for patronage. Mobutu was seemingly starting to lose his grip on power, which he had held since the mid-1960s. In response, Mobutu ended the decades-long ban on political ...

Monday, 20 Jul 2015
How Can States and Non-State Actors Respond to Authoritarian Resurgence?

Two weeks ago, the Monkey Cage ran a piece by Matthew Baum and Phil Potter suggesting that the policy of “democracy-promotion” has gone out of style.[1] I think they’re right that in many circles democracy-promotion is politically passé and that, more broadly, democracy advocates are really having a tough couple ...

Monday, 11 May 2015
Women’s Empowerment in India

From participation to political agency Women’s empowerment and equal participation in political life is important at all levels of Indian society. Despite benefitting from reservations, women frequently experience obstacles when they participate in politics. However, to address women’s aspirations for political agency we should explore the emerging opportunities, and not ...

Tuesday, 7 Oct 2014
What if the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded to Snowden?

Edward Snowden’s nomination for this year’s Nobel Peace Prize has stirred controversy in Norway and internationally. Is Snowden a (US) traitor or a (global) saviour? Will Norway allow him to receive the prize, resisting US demands to arrest and hand him over? Along with previous years’ nominations of Julian Assange ...

Wednesday, 30 Jul 2014
Measurement of Regime Type Effects on Police Focus

Is there any measurable way to tell whether police become more or less focused on crime prevention and public safety in nations that are not fully democratic? Interesting question. I guess answering it would have to start with a good theory as to why police would change their priorities and ...

Friday, 30 May 2014
Thailand’s Fragile Democracy

The traditional elite clings to an outdated world view. But a military coup offers no solution. ​Two days after the military coup in Thailand at least 13 bombs exploded, approximately simultaneously, in the city of Pattani. Three people, including a five-year-old child, were killed, and approximately 60 people injured. On ...

Friday, 16 May 2014
Democracy, Democratization, and Political Violence

The process of democratization is often violent in the short run, and democratic governments are more constrained in their use of force against insurgents than non-democratic authorities. But are democracies really more prone to political violence than other political systems? This is the theme of a short article published at ...

Monday, 12 May 2014
Electing India's Future

In April, 800 hundred million people began casting their ballots all across India in the largest election the world has ever seen. When we think of voting in India, we often picture a poor elderly villager showing a big ink-stained thumb and boasting a wide smile as proof of democracy ...

Saturday, 8 Feb 2014
Nepal Moves Towards Democracy

Democracy is to a large extent about parties being willing to accept electoral defeat. In Nepal the Maoist Party, previously engaged in guerrilla warfare, has done precisely this. A wave of election boycotts is sweeping across Asia. In Thailand’s election on 2 February the “Democrats” succeeded in preventing voting in ...

Sunday, 12 Jan 2014
Why does Democratization Occur in Waves?

The ‘Arab Spring’ demonstrated that political transitions tend to occur together in space and time. Samuel Huntington coined the term ‘Waves of democratization’ in his book The Third Wave. The figure above shows that changes to the proportion of the world’s countries that are democracies occurs in spurts. Confirming Huntington’s three waves ...