(C) Freedom House
This story was originally published by Freedom House and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Five Books to Help You Make Sense of Freedom in the World 2024 [1]
[]
Date: 2024-04
In February, Freedom House released the 51st edition of its flagship report, Freedom in the World. Within its pages, we note how global freedom declined for the 18th consecutive year, driven largely by flawed elections and violent, often authoritarian-led conflict. Attacks on pluralism—the peaceful coexistence of people with differing political, religious, or ethnic identities—often preceded measurable declines in freedom. And wherever freedom declined, human suffering increased.
It’s becoming a Freedom House tradition to connect themes from our reports to noteworthy books. Here are five that explore our report’s key topics: election manipulation, notable threats to freedom, authoritarian aggression, and the challenges of governing and living in disputed territories.
2018, Polity Press
Election manipulation was a factor in half of the 52 countries that saw score declines in 2023. Many of these countries were already rated Not Free, including Cambodia, Turkey, and Zimbabwe. But why would an incumbent leader or party in a Not Free country hold regular elections in the first place? Because elections, even phony ones, bestow a sense of legitimacy on the winner.
Researcher Adam Przeworski makes this case in Why Bother with Elections?, which explores the strengths and weaknesses of what he calls the “least bad mechanism” for choosing political leaders. With startling candor, Przeworski explains the “intense ambivalence” elections can inspire among voters, many of whom are left disappointed by their outcomes. But he goes on to explore the importance of competitive elections, which opposition groups have some chance of winning.
Even manipulated elections underscore the power behind the idea of a people’s mandate—and they occasionally deliver surprising results. For example, Thailand’s competitive (though ultimately unfair) national election last May was cause enough to bump its status from Not Free to Partly Free.
Steven Levitsky and Lucian A. Way, Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War
2010, Cambridge University Press
The end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union shifted the balance of power toward Western democracies and presented an opportunity for dozens of countries to break away from authoritarian rule. Some authoritarian regimes did indeed give way to democratic governments. Others simply stole some of the trappings of democracy—specifically, elections—and leveraged them to consolidate and expand their power. Authors Levitsky and Way label this competitive authoritarianism, and their book explores why countries became more or less free during this historical period.
Between 1990 and 1995, competitive authoritarian regimes emerged throughout Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Through careful analysis, the authors found that linkage (essentially, political, economic, and societal ties to Western democracies) was a key factor in their democratic evolution. Of the 35 countries they studied, only one high linkage country, Albania, failed to democratize.
Freedom in the World’s policy recommendations underscore the importance of international ties, calling on democratic governments to support defenders of democracy and human rights and protect the institutions and processes that bolster genuine elections and the peaceful transfer of power worldwide.
2020, W.W. Norton & Company
Attacks on pluralism were behind virtually every case of democratic decline measured in Freedom in the World 2024. Authoritarian rulers, pluralism’s primary antagonists, often originated those attacks.
These leaders are the focus of Ruth Ben-Ghiat’s Strongmen, which is both a modern history of their brand of rule and a guide to how these despots ply their trade. Ben-Ghiat contends that modern-day authoritarians still follow the century-old playbook first conceived by Italy’s Benito Mussolini. That playbook focused on attacking the core tenets of pluralism by, among other things, exploiting “us versus them” narratives, strategically orchestrating chaos and spreading disinformation, and using nostalgia to manipulate followers.
Present-day authoritarians like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Azerbaijan’s Ilham Aliyev have evolved these tactics for the 21st century. Citizens worldwide suffer the consequences, but few bear the brunt more than the millions living in disputed territories. Our already-low scores for Eastern Donbas and Crimea fell further this year, exacerbated by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Nagorno-Karabakh lost 40 points in Freedom in the World 2024, this edition’s largest decline, due to an Azerbaijani military offensive that forced more than 100,000 ethnic Armenians to flee.
2013, Random House
Ari Shavit, a progressive Israeli writer and commentator, links ancient conflicts to the present day to explain and extol the miracle of Israel’s existence—and grapple with the extraordinary, wrenching contradictions that arise when a nation well acquainted with occupation becomes a nation of occupiers.
The tragic events of the past year pushed the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fully into the spotlight. Hamas, the terrorist organization that has governed the Gaza Strip since 2007, killed 1,200 Israelis in a devastating attack last October. Israel’s retaliatory military offensive has killed tens of thousands of people in Gaza and displaced at least 1.7 million more. Our score for the Gaza Strip consequently fell into the single digits. Israel’s score also declined due to the conflict in Gaza but also because of increasing violence and repression in the West Bank, a territory Israel actively occupies.
Poignant and clear-eyed, Shavit’s book dives into the complex nuance of that aforementioned narrative of occupation. Unsurprisingly, it offers no easy answers—because there are none. Both sides would need to give up a great deal to achieve peace but are afraid of giving “too much” in the process, leaving them locked in their intractable conflict.
2022, W.W. Norton & Company
In 2011, a group of Harvard and NYU researchers studying economic and political instability found that states with arbitrary political borders, which did not account for divisions between nationalities and peoples, were especially likely to experience instability and violence. By their definition, 9 of the 13 most arbitrary states on Earth were in Africa. Four of them—Niger, Chad, Mali, and Sudan—have suffered coups since 2020.
The data is bracing. Just 7 percent of Africans live in a Free country. African countries suffered 7 of the 15 largest score declines in 2023. Six countries in the Sahel region alone have experienced recent coups; Niger, Chad, and Mali, which the researchers highlighted in 2011, are among them. But there’s more to the story than data alone.
“Modern Africa was designed against its will to be a divided thing,” writes Dipo Faloyin in Africa Is Not a Country, a bitingly funny and deeply insightful book explaining how the arbitrary borders drawn by European colonizers still haunt African countries today. “The irregular births of its nations, and the short time they’ve had to deal with the ramifications, underlie why so many are still fighting to overcome deep, foundational challenges.”
Faloyin offers a more nuanced understanding of Africa’s past and present than most Westerners encounter and chips away at patronizing narratives about Africa we’ve been fed for so long—the idea, if not the assumption, that a continent of 54 countries and well over a billion people could ever be considered a monolith.
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://freedomhouse.org/article/five-books-help-you-make-sense-freedom-world-2024
Published and (C) by Freedom House
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/freedomhouse/
