Introduction

Restricted access
Rights and permissions Cite this chapter

After decades of progress, democracy around the world has hit a snag. From Hungary to India, Venezuela to Turkey, Brazil to the Czech Republic, the quality of democracy is faltering. In 2020, for the first time since 2001, the majority of governments in the world are autocracies. Although pro-democracy protests reached an all-time high in 2019, key trends developing beneath the surface have slowed democracy’s forward momentum and are threatening to reverse the progress of the last several decades (Lührmann and Lindberg, 2020).

For many years, this was not the case. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the success of the liberal democratic order set in motion changes to the international environment that put authoritarian regimes on the defensive. Autocracies struggled to adapt to the post-Cold War reality, and their numbers rapidly declined. Democracy, it seemed, had triumphed and secured its status as the world’s preferred form of governance. Francis Fukuyama (1989) proclaimed that we had reached the end of history – the point where liberal capitalist democracies would be the norm. Counter to the hopes that democracy would take hold in places like China after the Tiananmen Square protests and in Russia after the Soviet Union broke down, the end of history had been prematurely declared (see Diamond, 2008, 2015).

The staunchest authoritarian regimes did not buckle in countries such as North Korea, China, Singapore and Vietnam. Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Armenia were also just as authoritarian as ever.1 The end of the Cold War also did little to change the democratic landscape in the Middle East – and though there were some positive developments in Africa, much of the continent had not democratized.

Content Metrics

May 2022 onwards Past Year Past 30 Days
Abstract Views 245 183 22
Full Text Views 53 44 0
PDF Downloads 11 4 0

Altmetrics