Author: newswriters

The International IDEA’s survey of democratic markers finds US is offering ‘encouragement’ to populist leaders Press freedom around the world has suffered its sharpest fall in 50 years as global democracy weakens dramatically, a landmark report has found. According to the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), democracy has declined in 94 countries over the last five years and only a third have made progress. “Democracy faces a perfect storm of autocratic resurgence and acute uncertainty, due to massive social and economic changes,” Kevin Casas-Zamora, the secretary-general of the thinktank, said. “To fight back, democracies need to protect…

By Jonathan Evans,Kirsten Lesage and Manolo Corichi Around the world, many people who do not identify with any religion nevertheless hold a variety of spiritual and religious beliefs, including the belief that there is life after death, according to a Pew Research Center study of religiously unaffiliated adults in 22 countries. The number of adults who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – has climbed rapidly in the recent past across North America, Europe, parts of Latin America and some countries in the Asia-Pacific region, such as Australia and South Korea. Full report: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/09/04/many-religious-nones-around-the-world-hold-spiritual-beliefs/?utm_source=Pew+Research+Center&utm_campaign=b1004ff6a0-Weekly_9-6-25&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-b1004ff6a0-400522077

 Subhash Dhuliya At the dawn of the 1990s, the United States stood alone at the pinnacle of power. Thirty years later, that supremacy is fading. The liberal order it once championed is unraveling, challenged by the rise of China, India, and the Global South—and by the disruptive force of information giants and artificial intelligence. This article explores the decline of American dominance, the return of great power rivalry, and the uncertain new order being shaped by geopolitics, technology, and the rise of Asia. ________________________________________________________________ In 1991, the United States stood unrivaled. The Soviet Union had collapsed, China was still a…

Subhash Dhuliya Globalization faces challenges: authoritarian populism threatens democracies, free markets face criticism for inequality, and cultural homogenization sparks resistance. Was 1991 the peak of globalization, and is 2025 its decline or reinvention? GLOBALISATION AT CROSSROADSDownload

The end of the Cold War in 1991 was widely seen in the West as the triumph of a specific model. Political theorist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed “the end of history” (1992), suggesting the ultimate victory of liberal democracy and market capitalism. However, this perspective largely overlooked the aspirations of the majority of the world’s population. Three decades later, it is clear that the story of globalization is not one of Western triumph but of global evolution. The central dynamic is no longer the spread of a single model but its reinvention by the nations of the Global South. By…

By Subhash Dhuliya The West’s two centuries of global dominance were a historical exception. For most of history, Asia — particularly China and India — accounted for the majority of global output. The “rise of the rest” is not disruption but restoration- Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore’s former foreign minister and author. The world has reached an inflection point. For three decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, globalization — led by liberal democracies and free markets — appeared unstoppable. Trade expanded, capital flowed across borders, and a seemingly universal consumer culture spread from Hollywood to Hong Kong. For…

The Internet has democratized access to information but in so doing has opened the floodgates to misinformation, fake news, and rank propaganda masquerading as dispassionate analysis. To investigate how people determine the credibility of digital information, we sampled 45 individuals: 10 Ph.D. historians, 10 professional fact checkers, and 25 Stanford University undergraduates. We observed them as they evaluated live websites and searched for information on social and political issues. Historians and students often fell victim to easily manipulated features of websites, such as official-looking logos and domain names. They read vertically, staying within a website to evaluate its reliability. In…

“It could be said that Instagram is the great classifieds ad of a deindustrialized economy, and that in this economy, scams and pyramid schemes are treated as decent and natural things” Instagram has birthed a peculiar economic model, one where influencers amass billions without tangibly advancing societal development, wealth, or wisdom. Purchasing a refrigerator, a car, or a tractor serves clear purposes: they enhance quality of life or productivity, embodying the tangible benefits of an industrial economy. In contrast, spending on an influencer’s life coaching or miracle dietary supplements—often imported cheaply from abroad—relies on little more than persuasive rhetoric. Instagram,…

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