Interview with Rahmatullah Amiri on the withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan and the increasing challenges for the peace process and civil society.

Interview with Rahmatullah Amiri on the withdrawal of international troops from Afghanistan and the increasing challenges for the peace process and civil society.

This article outlines the main features of the New EU Pact on Migration and Asylum, and describes the context in which the proposal has been drafted. Some of the initial critical comments made by different stakeholders will be further highlighted, to draw some preliminary conclusions.

US President Joe Biden is visiting Europe for the first time, on the occasion of the G7, NATO and EU-US summits. The opportunities for a new era of transatlantic cooperation are immense, but the window of opportunity to seize them is small.

Disinformation and misinformation thrive in uncertainty and secrecy. While growing awareness within the European Union of the threat posed by malign disinformation campaigns to undermine support for democratic values, and the EU project as a whole, has elicited a number of robust responses, these have mostly targeted external actors. Addressing threats from within Member States poses a more acute challenge, one that will require great thoughtfulness and delicacy to resolve, and require a unanimous collective effort.

The book #FakeYou shows that public and legislative policies used in the fight against disinformation, which have been pursued both in Spain and in other countries because of (or rather, with the excuse of) the so-called “new” phenomenon of fake news, often actually serve to distract from the real solution.

The unsavoury link between oligarchs, the banking sector, the media and politics is what characterizes, in a nutshell, the state of the Greek media landscape. The prolonged financial crisis has had a decisive role in further hampering media freedom in the country, posing a real threat to the quality of democracy in Greece.

Recently, the Hungarian ruling party and its media empire launched a massive campaign against independent policy analysts and opposition parties, accusing them of spreading anti-vaccination views. These campaigns follow a typical method of operation: they start from a single piece of information and end in some sort of discriminatory legislation against independent voices.

When discussing the issue of hate speech in the digital age, we often put the blame on content intermediaries such as Facebook or Twitter. But what happens when hateful speech in the form of party propaganda is indirectly or directly funded by the state, using public money?

Modern-day authoritarians will boil you like a frog, whilst slowly turning up the heat. As a citizen of a democratic state, governed by the rule of law, you won’t suddenly wake up one day to find yourself in an authoritarian regime. It will creep up on you. Hiding behind empty slogans such as “regaining national sovereignty” and “national pride”.