Credit: Attila Kisbenedek/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 8 2026 (IPS)

When Péter Magyar took the stage in Budapest on the night of 12 April, he told the crowd they had ‘liberated Hungary’. The hyperbole seemed justified. His party, Tisza, had won a parliamentary supermajority on the highest turnout since Hungary’s first free election in 1990, ending 16 years of increasingly autocratic rule.

An autocracy built in plain sight

Ousted Prime Minister Viktor Orbán boasted of turning Hungary into a model of what he called ‘illiberal democracy’. When he returned to power in 2010, he set about dismantling every institution capable of constraining him. His party, Fidesz, rewrote the constitution, restructured the Constitutional Court and gerrymandered electoral districts so thoroughly that in 2014 and 2018, it won two-thirds of parliamentary seats on under half of the vote.

Public broadcasting became a party mouthpiece, and Orbán-connected oligarchs took over private media. Fidesz captured universities and arts bodies. The government used Pegasus spyware against opponents, demonised migrants and LGBTQI+ people as threats to the nation and passed a law criminalising attendance at Budapest Pride. Civil society organisations faced escalating restrictions on their funding, and the government created a Sovereignty Protection Office to investigate and harass them further. The Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) index eventually downgraded Hungary to ‘electoral autocracy’ status — the first European Union (EU) member state to receive that designation.

The EU’s blind spot

The EU’s response was inadequate. In 2018, the European Parliament triggered Article 7(1) of the Treaty on European Union, the first step in a procedure that could, in theory, suspend a state’s voting rights. In practice, Article 7 was never fully applied, because doing so requires unanimous agreement among all other member states, and there are always states unwilling to go that far. The Rule of Law Conditionality Regulation, in force since 2022, allowed the EU to freeze up to US$32 billion in funds for Hungary, but this mechanism too was compromised by political calculation. In December 2023, the Commission released around US$12 billion in cohesion funds seemingly in exchange for Hungary lifting its veto on Ukraine aid, effectively trading rule-of-law conditionality for foreign policy compliance.

Ultimately, the EU did not solve its Orbán problem; Hungarian voters did. This suggests structural reforms are still needed to prevent another autocrat from playing the same blocking game Hungary did.

After Orbán

Previous opposition coalitions in Hungary failed partly because Orbán’s machine had a reliable weapon against them: the accusation that they served Brussels, Hungary-born funder George Soros and a cosmopolitan elite detached from Hungarian values. Magyar, a former Fidesz insider who broke with the party in February 2024 following a scandal over a presidential pardon granted to a man convicted of covering up child sexual abuse, was immune to that weapon. His campaign was deliberately post-ideological, focused on corruption, crumbling public services and economic stagnation, while Orbán ran a fear-based campaign centred on the EU and the war in Ukraine. Voters chose economic reality over a manufactured threat. In the end, the electoral architecture Orbán had built to reward the first-placed party converted Tisza’s win into a supermajority of 141 of 199 parliamentary seats.

But Magyar’s victory will not necessarily bring a progressive transformation. He is a conservative politician leading a centre-right party whose platform made no explicit commitment on LGBTQI+ rights. During the campaign, he criticised the Budapest Pride ban as a distraction rather than a rights violation, committing only to protecting freedom of assembly more broadly. His victory speech promised a Hungary where ‘no one is stigmatised for loving someone differently from the majority’, but this was a shift in tone rather than a policy commitment. LGBTQI+ rights are unlikely to regress further under Magyar, but recovery will depend on sustained pressure from civil society.

Orbán may be out of government, but Fidesz appointees remain embedded throughout the state apparatus. Magyar has pledged to invite the European Public Prosecutor’s Office to examine alleged misuses of EU funds, dismantle the Sovereignty Protection Office and drop proposed legislation that would have further extended powers to restrict civil society. Delivering on those pledges and unravelling 16 years of institutional capture will require sustained political will.

Hungarian civil society faces its first genuine opening in 16 years. To make the most of it, it will need to push hard and consistently for the restoration of civic space, the rule of law and LGBTQI+ rights, and not mistake a change of government for a change of direction.

For the EU, Magyar’s victory opens a window to change a decision-making structure that allows a single member state to hold the bloc’s foreign policy hostage. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s call for qualified majority voting for foreign policy decisions may now gain traction. But the broader question of how the EU enforces its democratic standards against a member state determined to flout them remains open. The EU should resolve it before the next challenge arises.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Kristian Tuxen Ladegaard Berg/NurPhoto via AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Apr 15 2026 (IPS)

When Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen addressed her supporters on election night on 24 March, she chose her words carefully. Losing four percentage points after almost seven years in power, she suggested, wasn’t so bad given there’s been a pandemic, a war in Europe and a confrontation with Donald Trump over Greenland. The reality was the Social Democrats had recorded their worst general election result since 1903. Meanwhile, the far-right Danish People’s Party (DPP) tripled its seat count, despite years of the Social Democrats leading a systematic crackdown on immigration to try to prevent it gaining support.

A historic result

While the Social Democrats came first on 21.9 per cent of the vote, they dropped from 50 to 38 seats. Their centre-right coalition partner, Venstre, had its worst result in its 150-year history. These are the two parties that have led every government since mainstream politics began copying far-right narratives on immigration. The bargain has benefitted neither.

Vote-switching data from exit polls told the story. The Social Democrats retained only around two thirds of their 2022 support. Their largest group of defectors — 13 per cent of their previous voters — switched to the Green Left, which now holds 20 seats as parliament’s second-largest party. Right-leaning voters switched to the DPP rather than rewarding the Social Democrats for delivering the immigration restrictions the DPP has long demanded. Time and again, evidence suggests that voters who are highly motivated about an issue tend to prefer parties that have always prioritised it over parties that have adopted it more recently out of electoral calculation.

The overall picture leaves neither bloc with a majority. The left-wing grouping holds 84 seats and the right holds 77, both short of the 90 needed to govern. Frederiksen has submitted her resignation as prime minister but, as leader of the largest party, has been charged with forming a new government. This is a task made harder by the conditions attached by Moderates leader Lars Løkke Rasmussen, who’s unwilling to join a government that does not include both left and right.

Twenty-five years of accommodation

The Social Democrats’ turn on immigration began in the aftermath of their 2001 election defeat. The party believed it was losing working-class voters to the far right over immigration and concluded it needed to compete on that ground. It framed anti-immigration policies as a defence of the welfare state, trying to emphasise solidarity rather than xenophobia, and over the next decade moved steadily rightward on this issue.

The nine seats the DPP got in 2001 became invaluable to centre-right Venstre leader Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who formed a minority government with its support. His government subsequently launched a wave of amendments to the Aliens Act, which was changed 93 times between 2002 and 2016 with the explicit goal of making Denmark less appealing to asylum seekers.

Throughout the 2000s and early 2010s, the DPP grew steadily, winning 20.6 per cent of votes in 2015 to become the biggest force on the right. Between 2015 and 2018, immigration law was amended over 70 times.

When Frederiksen became Social Democrat leader in 2015, she sought to outbid the DPP. By the 2019 election, the Social Democrats’ anti-immigration platform closely mirrored the DPP’s. And in the short term, it worked for them. They won the 2019 election while the DPP lost almost 12 percentage points. In losing, though, the DPP had won: its previously fringe positions on migration, belonging and identity had been absorbed into mainstream politics.

A rights-violating regime

On entering government in 2019, Frederiksen entrenched what the Social Democrats called a ‘paradigm shift’, moving from integration to deterrence, detention and return, with the stated goal of admitting ‘zero asylum seekers’. Denmark became the first European state to declare parts of Syria safe, enabling it to deport Syrian refugees to an active conflict zone. In 2021, parliament authorised the outsourcing of asylum processing to countries outside Europe. By 2024, Denmark was granting under 900 people asylum a year, the lowest figure in four decades, pandemic years excluded.

The human rights consequences have been documented by international civil society organisations and bodies such as the United Nations Committee Against Torture. Amnesty International has raised concerns about the forced return of asylum seekers to danger in violation of the 1951 Refugee Convention. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Denmark’s three-year waiting period for family reunification for refugees with temporary protection status violates the right to family life. Policies targeting government-classified ‘ghetto’ areas — overwhelmingly low-income neighbourhoods with high concentrations of people from migrant backgrounds — have been challenged at the European Court of Justice on grounds of racial discrimination.

The harm has been intentional. A framework designed to make Denmark as unwelcoming as possible has placed tens of thousands of people in prolonged legal uncertainty, with documented effects on family stability and mental health. Under Denmark’s presidency of the Council of the European Union, Frederiksen pressed for similar policies across Europe and, alongside far-right Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, lobbied for a revised European Convention on Human Rights to enable easier deportation. Centre-left governments in Sweden and the UK have looked to Denmark as a model.

Normalisation, not neutralisation

The political calculation was that taking ownership of immigration would reduce its salience as an issue and deny the far right the fuel to grow. Instead, the move intensified demand, leaving opponents of migration taking ever more extreme positions while erasing the distinction between mainstream and far-right politics.

Denmark’s experience is a lesson other European centre-left parties appear determined not to learn. Twenty-five years of accommodation have produced a society in which far-right assumptions have become normalised, at enormous and ongoing cost to those whose rights are being stripped away. This is not a template; it is a warning.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Mamunur Rashid/NurPhoto via AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Apr 6 2026 (IPS)

Bangladesh’s first credible election in nearly two decades delivered a landslide win for the Bangladesh Nationalist Party (BNP) and its leader Tarique Rahman, son of a former prime minister, just back from 17 years of self-imposed exile.

The election was made possible by a Generation Z-led uprising that security forces sought to repress by killing at least 1,400 people. The protest that began when young people rose up against a job quota system that functioned as a tool of patronage grew into a movement that brought down a government. Many protesters wanted something beyond the ousting of an authoritarian government, calling for old politics to be swept aside and young people to have a genuine say in government. What’s resulted falls short of that, and Bangladesh’s new government should be aware that unless it delivers genuine change, protests could rise again.

The uprising

The 2024 protests that toppled Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina began when Bangladesh’s High Court reinstated a 30 per cent quota for descendants of 1971 independence war veterans, leaving less than half of public sector jobs open to recruitment based on merit. In a country with acute youth unemployment, frustrated young people rejected this system as a vehicle for Awami League patronage. Coordinated by the Students Against Discrimination network, the movement spread nationwide through road and railway blockades.

The government’s response turned a policy dispute into a political crisis. Members of the Awami League’s student wing attacked protesters. Authorities imposed a nationwide curfew with a shoot-on-sight order, shut down the internet and directed security forces to fire lethal weapons into crowds. But the repression backfired. People used their phones to document every incident, and footage circulated widely after internet access was partly restored, directly undermining the government’s narrative that cast protesters as violent agitators. The killing of student coordinator Abu Sayed, filmed as he stood unarmed with arms outstretched before police opened fire, became the uprising’s defining image.

On 5 August 2024, facing a mass march on her residence, Hasina fled to India on an army helicopter. As CIVICUS’s 2026 State of Civil Society Report sets out, Bangladesh’s Gen Z-led uprising went on to inspire subsequent protests in Indonesia, Nepal and beyond.

Reforms in the balance

Three days after Hasina fled, Nobel Peace Prize-winning economist Muhammad Yunus was sworn in as Chief Adviser of an interim government. This was a victory for the student movement, which had made clear it would not accept a military-backed administration. His government established reform commissions covering the constitution, corruption, judiciary, police and public administration, and negotiated the July National Charter with political parties: 84 proposals designed to reduce the concentration of power in the prime minister’s office and make it structurally harder for any future government to capture the state the way Hasina had. Most parties signed it in October 2025.

But the path to the election was neither clean nor consensual. The International Crimes Tribunal, a domestic judicial body reinstated by the interim government, convicted Hasina in absentia for crimes against humanity and sentenced her to death. In May 2025, the interim government banned the Awami League under anti-terrorism legislation. International observers warned that excluding the country’s largest party risked disenfranchising millions and undermining the election’s democratic credibility.

The election timing was also bitterly contested: the BNP, eager to capitalise on its frontrunner status, pushed for an early date, while the newly formed National Citizen Party (NCP), founded by Gen Z protesters, wanted more time to organise and for institutional reforms to be locked in first. The BNP prevailed.

A dynasty returns

The BNP and its allies won 209 of 299 contested seats, securing a decisive two-thirds parliamentary majority. The right-wing Islamist party Jamaat-e-Islami — whose 2013 ban the interim government lifted — emerged as the main opposition with close to 80 seats, its best-ever result. The NCP won just six of the 30 seats it contested.

The NCP’s poor showing had partly structural causes — formed in February 2025, it had barely a year to build an organisation with limited funds and no networks beyond urban centres — and was partly self-inflicted. A decision to ally with Jamaat-e-Islami as part of an 11-party coalition alienated many young voters who had hoped for genuinely new politics. Prominent NCP figures resigned in protest and stood as independents. NCP leader Nahid Islam, just 27 years old, did win a seat, and the party has pledged to rebuild in opposition.

The election itself was a genuine improvement on Bangladesh’s recent history. Turnout reached 60 per cent, up from 42 per cent in the fraud-ridden 2024 poll. Over 60 per cent of voters endorsed the July Charter in a referendum that was held alongside the election, giving the reform agenda a democratic mandate the new government will find difficult to ignore. Yet the vote would have been more legitimate had all parties been permitted to compete freely, and the campaign was not fully free of violence either: rights groups documented that at least 16 political activists were killed in the run-up to polling day.

Now the BNP inherits a state apparatus politicised over decades of one-party dominance and holds a two-thirds parliamentary majority with no meaningful check on its authority. Whether it will govern differently from those it replaced, or simply settle into the same logic of power, remains to be seen. The young people whose uprising made this election possible are watching. They have already brought down one government. The new one would do well to remember this.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Ryan Brown/UN Women

By Inés M. Pousadela and Samuel King
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay / BRUSSELS, Belgium, Mar 30 2026 (IPS)

On 19 March, the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) did something unprecedented in its eight-decade history: it held a vote. The Trump administration, having spent two weeks attempting to defer, amend and ultimately block the session’s main outcome document, known as the agreed conclusions, cast the only vote against its adoption. That dissenting vote said a lot, as it came from the world’s most powerful government, backed by financial leverage, bilateral reach and a network of anti-rights states and organisations that are making inroads at many levels.

Established in 1946, the CSW brings together 45 states each year to negotiate commitments that, while not legally binding, shape domestic legislation, set international norms and signal the direction of political will. Civil society plays an important role in it: the NGO Committee on the Status of Women coordinates thousands of organisations, from large international bodies to grassroots groups, with the aim of ensuring those most affected by policy have a seat at the table. For several decades, this has been the closest thing the world has to a dedicated annual intergovernmental negotiation on women’s rights.

The assault on gender equality

The Trump administration arrived at CSW70 having withdrawn from UN Women in January and from its Executive Board in February, citing opposition to what it calls ‘gender ideology’. It submitted eight amendments targeting language on reproductive health. When these didn’t succeed, it attempted to defer or withdraw the conclusions entirely. When that too failed, it voted against adoption and tabled a separate resolution seeking to impose a restrictive definition of gender, effectively attempting to rewrite 30 years of carefully negotiated commitments. Its resolution was blocked.

At the Munich Security Conference in February, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio defined western civilisation as bound together by Christian faith, shared ancestry and cultural heritage, an ideological approach that treats women’s equality, reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ rights not as human rights but ideological impositions to be rejected. The Trump administration’s financial muscle is now the delivery mechanism for this worldview.

Defunding as a weapon

The immediate material crisis at CSW70 was the collapse of funding. The elimination of 90 per cent of USAID contracts wiped out US$60 billion in foreign aid. The USA is instead negotiating bilateral deals with 71 countries under its ‘America First’ global health strategy, extending its global gag rule not just to civil society organisations but to recipient governments. This means any institution that receives US health funding must certify that neither it nor any organisation it works with promotes or provides abortion.

Funding will now flow through faith-based groups, with ultra-conservative Christian organisations such as the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Watch International set to benefit, having spent years building networks across Africa, Asia and Latin America. They use the language of family values, parental rights and national sovereignty to consolidate conservative influence over laws affecting women, LGBTQI+ people and young people. In many countries, they already have direct access to governments while progressive organisations are routinely excluded.

With threats intensifying, the UN is signalling retreat. A proposal under the UN80 cost-cutting initiative to merge UN Women with the UN Population Fund (UNFPA) has alarmed civil society worldwide. The stated rationale is efficiency, but there’s little overlap between the two agencies and their combined budgets make up a small part of the UN’s overall spending, suggesting savings would be modest. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that the targeting of these organisations reflects the increasing contestation of their rights-based mandates rather than any logic of organisational efficiency.

Over 500 civil society organisations signed an open letter to UN Secretary-General António Guterres warning that, when sexual and reproductive health rights are absorbed into broader mandates, they risk ‘being deprioritised, underfunded, or rendered politically invisible’. Some states have urged caution but so far none has committed to blocking the merger.

Civil society holds the line

In difficult times, over 4,600 civil society delegates attended CSW70 and made their presence count. They took the floor to name structural barriers and demand accountability: youth representatives challenged the normalisation of online violence, Pacific Island delegates described how geography compounds the denial of justice for survivors, and activists from Haiti documented the labour exploitation of migrant domestic workers. They all emphasised that when women’s rights organisations are restricted or defunded, survivors lose their primary pathway to justice.

The NGO CSW Forum hosted over 750 events alongside the official session. But not everyone could participate. US visa restrictions meant several women’s rights activists, particularly from the global south, couldn’t enter the country. This is a worsening problem that limits civil society’s ability to engage.

CIVICUS’s newly released 2026 State of Civil Society Report documents exactly what civil society has been up against: institutions built to protect women’s rights under sustained, coordinated attack, their funding cut, their mandates targeted and the human rights values they are built on reopened for revision. CSW70’s agreed conclusions offer hope, committing states to action on AI governance, discriminatory laws, digital justice, labour rights, legal aid and the formal recognition of care workers. But as the contest over them made plain, political will is running low and the anti-rights community is emboldened. Civil society left CSW70 without losing ground – and this seems to be the measure of success in the regressive times we live in.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Marco Longari/AFP

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Mar 9 2026 (IPS)

Consider what International Women’s Day looked like a few years ago, and what it looks like now: the same date, the same global moment of reflection, but a vastly changed global landscape. Gender rights are facing the most coordinated and wide-ranging attack in decades. Anti-rights forces are dismantling protections secured after generations of struggle, destroying infrastructure built to address gender-based violence and realise reproductive rights and rewriting legal frameworks to roll back rights, with a specific focus on excluding transgender people. This is the result of a deliberate, carefully crafted, handsomely funded and globally coordinated strategy.

Fortunately, resistance is proving harder to extinguish than those driving the backlash had expected. Another International Women’s Day of mobilisation is here to prove it.

A regressive template

While attacks have been building for years, the global landscape shifted quickly in January 2025, when a newly inaugurated Donald Trump signed executive orders imposing a rigid binary classification of sex across federal law, stripping non-discrimination protections for LGBTQI+ people in healthcare and housing, and banning diversity, equity and inclusion policies across the federal government. Because the USA had been the world’s largest bilateral donor, the simultaneous dismantling of USAID and expansion of the global gag rule — blocking US funding to organisations that provide abortions or advocate for abortion rights — had immediate effects on women and girls all over the world, with particularly deadly consequences in conflict zones, rural areas and the world’s poorest countries.

Elsewhere, regressive forces were already mobilising – and Trump’s example only emboldened them. Hungary banned Pride marches and authorised surveillance to enforce compliance. Slovakia and the UK redefined sex as exclusively biological, stripping legal recognition from non-binary and transgender people. Burkina Faso criminalised same-sex relations and their ‘promotion’. Trinidad and Tobago’s Court of Appeal reinstated colonial-era penalties for homosexuality of up to 25 years in prison. Kazakhstan introduced a Russian-style ban on positive LGBTQI+ representation in education, media and online platforms.

It’s striking how consistent the underlying logic is across different political and regional contexts: gender equality is framed as a dangerous ‘ideology’, feminism is demonised as a foreign imposition, LGBTQI+ visibility is portrayed as a threat to children. The similarities reflect a coordinated effort to manufacture cultural conflict to consolidate hierarchies, strengthen elite authority and deflect attention from economic and political failures.

The backlash has reached the international institutions that have long served feminist movements as key arenas for developing a common language, setting a shared agenda and coordinating action across borders. A milestone in anti-rights advances was observed at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s 69th session last year, where a well-organised anti-rights bloc succeeded in stripping longstanding references to sexual and reproductive health and rights from the meeting’s Political Declaration.

What resistance looks like

Yet regression is not going uncontested: not in the streets, not in the courts and not even in the world’s most repressive settings.

In Hungary, tens of thousands defied the Pride ban in Budapest, risking prosecution to assert their right to be visible in public space. In South Africa, sustained civil society pressure, including over a million signatures demanding action, compelled the government to declare gender-based violence and femicide a national disaster. In St Lucia, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court struck down colonial-era laws criminalising same-sex relations. Courts in Malawi and Nigeria recognised the right to safe abortion for sexual violence survivors. The UK finally repealed a Victorian-era law that had continued to criminalise abortion in England and Wales. Denmark and Norway improved access to abortion services. Marriage equality came into force in both Liechtenstein and Thailand. At least three European Union member states — the Czech Republic, France and Poland — adopted consent-based definitions of rape.

Even in the most difficult of circumstances, under Afghanistan’s system of gender apartheid, women are maintaining underground schools, keeping solidarity networks alive and documenting abuses, setting their sights on future justice processes.

While the list of advances is impressive, some of the most important contemporary victories are invisible: stalled bills, softened provisions, laws not passed because civil society refused to stand aside. An attempt to repeal The Gambia’s ban on female genital mutilation was blocked. Kenya’s anti-LGBTQI+ Family Protection Bill remains stalled. In Latvia, when conservative forces moved in October 2025 to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention on violence against women, large-scale protests and a civil society petition won what could be a crucial delay. These defensive successes rarely make headlines, but they result from sustained, unglamorous advocacy and coalition work. Without them, the most extreme proposals would advance much further and faster.

Rising to the challenge

Recognition of rights is never permanent. It’s won through sustained struggle and can be reversed through organised opposition from those who perceive other people’s rights as a threat to their privilege. Backlash isn’t a historical anomaly but a predictable counter-mobilisation, and civil society has met it as such, by organising, mobilising, litigating and refusing to concede ground.

This is precisely what CIVICUS’s 2026 State of Civil Society Report, set for release on 12 March, sets out to document. The report examines the state of the world and civil society action throughout 2025 and early 2026 – including a dedicated chapter on women’s and LGBTQI+ people’s rights – and reveals strong patterns of resistance. Across regions and political contexts, it shows how civil society understands the scale of the attack and is responding in every possible way.

As this International Women’s Day will once again make clear, the backlash is organised and strong. But so is the resistance.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Georgios Kostomitsopoulos/NurPhoto via Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 24 2026 (IPS)

The Islamic Republic of Iran has put down another uprising, with a ferocity that makes previous crackdowns seem restrained. The theocratic regime has survived, but it has done so by substituting violence for the economic security it cannot provide and the political legitimacy it no longer has. Its show of force is also an admission of weakness.

The protests that began on 28 December were triggered by a specific event — the collapse of the rial to a record low — but rooted in years of accumulated grievances. The second half of 2025 alone saw at least 471 labour protests across 69 Iranian cities. Inflation stood at 49.4 per cent. The 12-day war with Israel in June sent the Tehran Stock Exchange down around 40 per cent and cost many people their jobs. The United Nations Security Council reimposed sanctions in September. The government cut fuel subsidies in November and slashed exchange-rate subsidies in December. Over 40 per cent of Iranian households now live below the poverty line and around half the population consume fewer than the recommended 2,100 calories per day.

It was this collapse that brought typically conservative bazaar merchants onto the streets. Within two weeks, the protests had spread to all of Iran’s 31 provinces, drawing in the urban middle class, working-class communities and people from rural provinces who had historically been among the regime’s most reliable supporters. What began as an economic stoppage rapidly became political defiance. For the millions who joined the striking merchants, the plummeting currency and rising cost of food were not market failures; they were proof of the regime’s corruption and ineptitude. Generation Z played a central role, demanding not reform but profound change. Lethal repression provided further confirmation the system was beyond reform.

The state’s response evolved. Initially it offered token economic concessions alongside its usual crowd control violence such as batons and teargas. When it became clear that a widespread movement with political demands had taken hold, it shifted to total attrition. On 8 January, authorities imposed a near-total internet shutdown and authorised security forces to use military-grade weapons against crowds. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) – a parallel military structure, major political force and economic empire with a direct stake in the regime’s survival – spearheaded the crackdown, with its affiliated Basij paramilitary networks playing a central role in street-level violence.

The casualty figures were deliberately obscured by the internet blackout, but all evidence points in the same direction. Hengaw Organisation for Human Rights reported that at least 3,000 civilians — including 44 children — were killed in the first 17 days. Iran Human Rights, citing Ministry of Health sources, documented a minimum of 3,379 deaths across 15 provinces. The US-based Human Rights Activists News Agency reported around 7,000 verified fatalities by mid-February, with 12,000 further cases under review. Time magazine cited hospital records suggesting the toll may have reached 30,000. Even the lowest of these figures vastly eclipses the 537 deaths recorded during the 2022-2023 Woman, Life, Freedom protests. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s concession that ‘several thousand’ had been killed confirmed the order of magnitude.

By 16 January the streets had been cleared, but a quieter repressive campaign continued, with nighttime raids, enforced disappearances and mass detentions in unofficial holding sites outside the legal system, targeting not only protesters but also doctors who treated the wounded, lawyers who provided legal assistance, bystanders who helped and people who posted supportive statements online. Authorities have detained over 50,000 people. Revolutionary Courts have fast-tracked mass indictments through summary trials, often conducted online and lasting mere minutes, with defendants denied independent legal counsel and confessions extracted under torture. Eighteen-year-old Saleh Mohammadi, whose retracted confession was obtained after interrogators broke bones in his hand, has been sentenced to be publicly hanged at the site of his alleged crime. Dozens more face imminent execution.

The regime has, for now, held: its security forces have not fractured, there have been no significant elite defections, and the IRGC has maintained its capacity for suppression. But it rules over a country with a wrecked economy, a battered nuclear programme, weakened regional proxies and a population that has run out of reasons to comply. Each protest cycle has required a higher threshold of state violence to suppress, a sign the regime has no other tool left.

What prevents weakness from becoming collapse is the absence of any alternative. The international response briefly suggested external pressure might tell – but did not. Donald Trump told Iranian protesters that ‘help is on its way’. The European Union listed the IRGC as a terrorist organisation. The UK imposed fresh sanctions. The Iranian diaspora held at least 168 protests across 30 countries. But the international noise simply enabled the regime to spread the narrative that the uprising was foreign-directed.

The exiled opposition is fragmented along ethnic, ideological and generational lines, seemingly more consumed by internal rivalries than the task of converting widespread discontent into sustained political pressure. Inside Iran, the most credible opposition voices — Nobel laureate Narges Mohammadi, reformist politician Mostafa Tajzadeh and veteran leader Mir Hossein Mousavi — are imprisoned or cut off from public life.

A weakened regime facing a leaderless opposition can endure, but what it cannot do is reverse its decay. Violence may clear the streets, but it cannot rebuild the economy, restore trust or give Iran’s young people a reason to stay. The regime has bought time, at an ever-rising price, but the crisis it’s suppressed isn’t going away.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Evelis Cano, mother of political prisoner Jack Tantak Cano, pleads with the police for her son’s release outside a detention centre in Caracas, Venezuela, 20 January 2026. Credit: Gaby Oraa/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 2 2026 (IPS)

When US special forces seized Nicolás Maduro and his wife from the presidential residence in Caracas on 3 January, killing at least 24 Venezuelan security officers and 32 Cuban intelligence operatives in the process, many in the Venezuelan opposition briefly dared hope.

They speculated that intervention might finally bring the democratic transition thwarted when Maduro entrenched himself in power after losing the July 2024 election. But within hours, those hopes were crushed. Trump announced the USA would now ‘run’ Venezuela and Vice-President Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in to replace Maduro. Venezuela’s sovereignty had been violated twice: first by an authoritarian regime that usurped the popular will, and then by an external power that deliberately violated international law.

A cynical intervention

Under Trump, the USA has abandoned any pretence of promoting democracy. Trump wrapped the intervention in the rhetoric of anti-narcotics operations while openly salivating over Venezuela’s oil reserves, rare earth deposits and investment opportunities. He repeatedly made clear that US regional hegemony is the number one priority. His contempt for Venezuelans’ right to self-determination was explicit: when asked about opposition leader María Corina Machado, Trump dismissed her as lacking ‘respect’ and ‘capacity to lead’. The message to Venezuela’s democratic movement was clear: your struggle doesn’t matter, only our interests do.

Ironically, the US intervention achieved what years of Maduro’s propaganda failed to do, giving anti-imperialist rhetoric a shot in the arm. For decades, Latin American authoritarian regimes have justified repression by pointing to the threat of US intervention, even though this was a largely historical grievance. Not anymore: Trump has handed every Latin American dictator the perfect justification for continuing authoritarian rule.

The global response has been equally revealing. The loudest defenders of national sovereignty are authoritarian powers such as China, Iran and Russia: states that routinely violate their citizens’ rights expressed their ‘solidarity with the people of Venezuela’ and positioned themselves as champions of international law. By blatantly violating a foundational principle of the post-1945 international order, Trump made the leaders of some of the world’s most repressive regimes look like the adults in the room. And across Latin America, the political conversation has now shifted dramatically: the question is no longer how to restore democracy in Venezuela, but how to prevent the next US military adventure in Latin America.

Authoritarianism continues

Meanwhile, Venezuela’s authoritarian regime remains intact. Maduro may be in a New York courtroom, but the structures that kept him in power—the corrupt military, embedded Cuban intelligence, patronage networks and the repressive apparatus – continue unchanged. Rodríguez will likely try to run down the clock, claiming Maduro could return at any moment to avoid calling elections while quietly negotiating oil deals with US companies and reasserting authoritarian control. For both Rodríguez and Trump, democracy seems like an inconvenient obstacle to resource extraction.

For Venezuelan civil society, this creates real dilemmas. As she was sworn in, Rodríguez denounced the operation that put her in charge and vowed that Venezuela would ‘never again be a colony of any empire’. She has wrapped herself in the flag, framing regime continuity as a patriotic stand against western imperialism, and can now easily paint opposition activists who have long demanded international pressure for democracy as treasonous collaborators with foreign powers. This is despite being an insider of a regime that welcomed Cuban intelligence, Iranian oil traders and Russian military advisers, and is now negotiating oil deals with the USA and crossing its own red line by promising legal changes to enable private investment.

A Venezuelan solution for Venezuela

But there may be some cracks in the regime. With Maduro gone, frictions inside the ruling party have become apparent. For instance, there have been obvious disagreements on how to handle the pressure to free Venezuela’s over 800 political prisoners. These may yield opportunities the democracy movement can exploit.

This is the time for the democratic opposition to reclaim the narrative. In the immediate aftermath of the intervention, families of political prisoners mounted vigils outside detention centres, demanding releases the government has only partially delivered. Civil society must amplify these voices, making clear that any transitional arrangement requires the dismantling of the repressive apparatus, not merely a change of faces at the top.

A broad coalition of civil society organisations has issued 10 demands that chart a path to democratic transition. They call for the immediate and unconditional release of political prisoners, the dismantling of irregular armed groups, unfettered access for human rights monitors and humanitarian aid and, crucially, a free and fair presidential election with international observers. These demands deserve international backing, not as conditions for oil contracts, but as non-negotiable requirements for any government that can claim to represent Venezuela.

Venezuela’s democratic forces can either accept marginalisation as Trump and Rodríguez carve up their country’s resources, or use this chaotic moment to advance a genuinely Venezuelan democratic agenda. That means rejecting both Maduro’s authoritarianism and Trump’s intervention, and insisting that any legitimacy Rodríguez’s government claims must come from Venezuelan voters, not US armed forces or oil contracts. Any window of opportunity may however be closing fast. The question is whether Venezuela’s democratic movement can seize it to build the country they have strived for, or whether they will remain spectators while others decide their fate.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jan 26 2026 (IPS)

When Ugandans went to the polls on 15 January, the outcome was never in doubt. As voting began, mobile internet services ground to a halt, ensuring minimal scrutiny as President Yoweri Museveni secured his seventh consecutive term. Far from offering democratic choice, the vote reinforced one of Africa’s longest-running presidencies, providing a veneer of democratic legitimacy while stifling competition.

Four decades in power

Museveni’s four-decade grip on power began with the Bush War, a guerrilla conflict that brought him to office in 1986. Single-party rule lasted for almost two decades, deemed necessary for national reconstruction. The 1995 constitution granted parliament and the judiciary autonomy and introduced a two-term presidential limit and age cap of 75, but maintained the ban on political parties.

With one-party rule increasingly called into question, Museveni restored multi-party politics in 2005. However, he simultaneously orchestrated a constitutional amendment to remove term limits. In 2017 he abolished the age restriction, allowing him to run for a sixth term in 2021.

Recent elections have been marked by state violence. Museveni’s 2021 campaign against opposition challenger Bobi Wine was defined by government brutality, with over a hundred people killed in protests following Wine’s arrest in November 2020. Another opposition leader, Kizza Besigye, has been arrested or detained more than a thousand times over the years.

Museveni promoted his son, Muhoozi Kainerugaba, to Chief of Defence Forces in 2024. Kainerugaba has openly boasted on social media about torturing political opponents, reflecting a regime that no longer bothers to conceal its brutality. His rise signals a potential hereditary handover.

Civic space shutdown

In the face of a credible opposition challenge, this year’s election required more than constitutional tinkering: it demanded the systematic restriction of civic space. The Trump administration’s dissolution of USAID in early 2025 helped Museveni here, because it was catastrophic for Ugandan civil society. Almost all US-funded Good Governance and Civil Society programmes were cancelled, hollowing out the civic education networks that once reached first-time and rural voters. State propaganda filled the vacuum.

A coordinated assault on dissent followed. Between June and October, climate and environmental activists were repeatedly denied bail, spending months in prison for peacefully protesting against the East African Crude Oil Pipeline. The regime’s reach extended beyond borders: in November 2024, Besigye was abducted in Nairobi and appeared days later at a military court in Kampala, charged with capital offences despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring military trials for civilians unconstitutional. Museveni simply legalised the practice in June 2025.

Intimidation intensified as the vote neared. Authorities arrested Sarah Bireete, executive director of the Center for Constitutional Governance, without a warrant, holding her for four days in violation of constitutional limits. In his New Year’s Eve address, Museveni explicitly instructed security forces to use more teargas against opposition supporters, whom he called criminals. In the days that followed, security forces used teargas, along with pepper spray and physical violence, to disperse opposition rallies. Hundreds of Wine supporters were abducted or detained.

The government dismantled the infrastructure needed for independent monitoring. Authorities suspended five prominent human rights organisations, and two days before voting, the Uganda Communications Commission implemented a nationwide internet shutdown, ostensibly to prevent disinformation. The blackout ensured election day irregularities would go undocumented.

Election irregularities and violence

Election day was plagued by technical failures, but Wine, again the major challenger, also claimed wholesale ballot stuffing and the abduction of polling agents. The Electoral Commission head admitted receiving private warnings from senior government figures against declaring some opposition candidates as winners.

International observers attempted diplomatic language, noting the environment was ‘relatively peaceful’ compared to 2021 while expressing serious concerns about harassment, intimidation and arrests. They recognised that the internet blackout hindered their ability to document irregularities.

Post-election violence claimed at least 12 lives. The deadliest incident occurred in Butambala district, where security forces killed between seven and 10 opposition supporters. Wine was placed under house arrest while the count was held in opaque conditions. Results were announced by region rather than polling station, limiting monitors’ ability to validate them. According to the official count, Museveni won with around 71 per cent, while Wine’s tally dropped to 25 per cent from 35 per cent in 2021. Turnout stood at just 52 per cent, meaning over 10 million eligible voters stayed home.

A generational breaking point

Ugandans’ median age is 17; 78 per cent of people are under 35. Most have known only one president. Wine, a 44-year-old singer turned politician whose music had long resonated with young Ugandans’ frustrations, campaigned on promises of change. But he’s now been defeated twice in a highly uneven race.

Young people have sought other ways to make their voices heard. In 2024, they took to the streets to protest against corruption, but they were met with security force violence and mass arrests.

Avenues for change appear blocked. Opposition parliamentary representation is insufficient for meaningful reform. Civil society groups face restrictive laws and lack international support. International partners are quiet because Uganda is strategically valuable: it provides troops for regional operations, shelters two million refugees, facilitates Chinese and French oil drilling and recently agreed to accept US deportees.

Given his advanced age, Museveni is unlikely to run again in 2031. But with authority increasingly concentrated on a tight inner circle of relatives, democratic transition may be less likely than an eventual transfer of power to his son. Uganda’s young majority faces a difficult choice: accept a status quo that offers no prospects or confront a security apparatus that has spent years perfecting its use of violence.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jan 20 2026 (IPS)

In December, the dust settled on Guinea’s first presidential election since the military took control in a 2021 coup. General Mamady Doumbouya stayed in power after receiving 87 per cent of the vote. But the outcome was never in doubt: this was no a democratic milestone; it was the culmination of Guinea’s denied transition to civilian rule.

Doumbouya has successfully performed an act of political alchemy, turning a military autocracy into an electoral one. By systematically dismantling the opposition, silencing the press and rewriting laws to suit his ambitions, he has made sure to shield his grip on power with a thin veil of electoral legitimacy.

The architecture of autocracy

The path to this moment was paved with precision. In April 2025, Doumbouya announced a constitutional referendum, a move that may have looked like it would herald the beginning of the end of military rule. But it was something else entirely. By June, Doumbouya had further centralised control by creating a new General Directorate of Elections. This body, placed firmly under the thumb of the Ministry of Territorial Administration, reversed previous efforts to establish an independent electoral institution.

The constitution was drafted in the shadows by the National Council of the Transition, the junta-appointed legislative body. While early drafts reportedly contained safeguards against lifetime presidencies, these were stripped away before the final text reached the public. The result was a document that removed a ban on junta members running for office, extended presidential terms from five to seven years and granted the president the power to appoint a third of the newly created Senate.

When the referendum was held on 21 September, it rubber-stamped de facto rule. Official figures claimed 89 per cent support with an 86 per cent turnout, numbers that defied the reality of a widespread opposition boycott and a palpable lack of public enthusiasm.

A climate of fear

With a blanket ban on protests in effect since May 2022, those who’ve dared challenge the junta’s controlled transition have been met with security force violence. On 6 January 2025, security forces killed at least three people, including two children, during demonstrations called by the opposition coalition Forces Vives de Guinée.

The political landscape was further cleared through administrative and judicial means. In October 2024, the government dissolved over 50 political parties. By August 2025, major opposition groups such as the Rally of the People of Guinea had been suspended. Key challengers, including former Prime Minister Cellou Dalein Diallo, remain in exile, while others, among them Aliou Bah, have been sentenced to prison – in Bah’s case, for allegedly insulting Doumbouya.

The atmosphere of fear has been reinforced by a brutal crackdown on the media. Guinea plummeted 25 places in the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, the year’s largest fall. Independent outlets have had their licences revoked and journalists have been detained. Those still working have learned to practise strict self-censorship to avoid becoming the next target. This meant that as voters went to the polls, there was nobody to provide diverse perspectives, scrutinise the process, investigate irregularities or hold authorities accountable.

Coup contagion

Guinea is no outlier. Since 2020, a coup contagion has swept through Africa, with military takeovers in Burkina Faso, Chad, Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Madagascar, Mali, Niger and Sudan. In each instance, the script has been similar: military leaders seize power promising to ‘correct’ the failures of the previous regime, only to break their promises of a return to civilian rule.

Guinea is now the third country among this recent wave to move from a military dictatorship to an electoral autocracy. It follows in the footsteps of Chad, where Mahamat Idriss Déby secured victory in May 2024 after the suspicious killing of his main opponent, and Gabon, where General Brice Oligui Nguema won a 2025 election with a reported 90 per cent of the vote.

The international community does little. Doumbouya routinely ignored deadlines and sanctions from the Economic Community of West African States, which once prided itself on a ‘zero-tolerance’ policy for coups, and no consequences ensued. The African Union and the United Nations offered rhetorical concern, but their warnings were not accompanied by tangible diplomatic or economic repercussions.

The world’s willingness to maintain business as usual while Doumbouya steered through a fake transition sends a dangerous message to other aspiring autocrats, in the region and beyond.

Democracy denied

When Doumbouya seized power in 2021, he was greeted with a degree of cautious optimism. His predecessor, Alpha Condé, had controversially amended the constitution to secure a third term amid violent protests and corruption and fraud allegations. Doumbouya promised to fix things, but instead became a mirror image of the man he ousted, using the same tactics of constitutional revision and repression to secure his power.

The statistics of the December election – an 87 per cent victory on a claimed 80 per cent turnout – do not reflect a genuine mandate but rather a vacuum: with no independent media to scrutinise the process and no viable opposition allowed to run, the election was a technicality.

The prospects for real democracy in Guinea appear remote. Doumbouya has secured a seven-year mandate through an election that eliminated the essential infrastructure needed for democracy. In the absence of stronger international pressure and tangible support for Guinean civil society, Guinea faces prolonged authoritarian rule behind a democratic facade, with dismal human rights prospects.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Dec 27 2025 (IPS)

Hours before world leaders gathered in Johannesburg for the 2025 G20 summit in November, hundreds of South African women wearing black lay down in a city park for 15 minutes — one for each woman who loses her life every day to gender-based violence in the country. The striking visual protest was organised by a civil society organisation, Women for Change, which also gathered over a million signatures demanding the government declare gender-based violence (GBV) a national disaster. Hours later, the government acquiesced.

It was a vital victory in a year marked by brutal violence and political backlash. As the dust settles on the 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence campaign – an annual event that starts on 25 November, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, and ends on 10 December, Human Rights Day – the achievement in South Africa stands in contrast to a global landscape of regression.

The numbers that motivated this year’s mobilisations tell a grim story. In 2024, around 4,000 women were victims of femicides in Latin America alone, amounting to nearly 11 gender-related killings a day. Africa has the world’s highest rate at three femicides per 100,000 women, with South Africa’s numbers off the charts.

Throughout 2025, women took to the streets in response to sustained patterns of violence and femicide cases that shocked society. In Argentina, protests erupted in September following the live-streamed torture and killing of three young women by a drug-trafficking gang. In Brazil, tens of thousands mobilised in December after a woman was run over by her ex-boyfriend and dragged across concrete for a kilometre, resulting in the loss of her legs. In Italy, nationwide protests followed the murders of two 22-year-old students in April and the killing of a 14-year-old girl by an older boy whose advances she rejected in May.

These highly visible cases were the tip of the iceberg. Yet they galvanised mobilisations because of decades of civil society groundwork: naming femicide as a distinct phenomenon, fighting for legal recognition and creating the databases many governments still refuse to maintain. This deliberate work of counting the dead has transformed individual tragedies into evidence of systematic violence, making it impossible for states to dismiss each killing as an isolated incident.

This sustained pressure forced some governments to act. In 2025, Spain became a European Union (EU) pioneer in criminalising vicarious violence — violence perpetrated against women through intermediaries, typically children or family members. Its new law, passed in September, followed Mexico’s 2023 recognition of this form of abuse. On 25 November, coinciding with International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Italy’s parliament passed a law making femicide a distinct criminal offence punishable by life imprisonment. The achievement is all the more significant given that, until 1981, the Italian penal code still offered leniency for so-called ‘honour killings’.

But progress is fragile. Right-wing governments that frame anti-GBV measures as ideological are moving to dismantle decades of feminist victories. In Argentina, the right-wing government of President Javier Milei has eliminated the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity and announced plans to dismantle comprehensive sexuality education and repeal gender parity in electoral lists, among other regressive changes.

In Turkey, which abandoned the Istanbul Convention – the Council of Europe Convention on preventing and combating violence against women and domestic violence – in 2021, thousands of women defied sweeping protest bans to demand justice over the suspicious death of a 21-year-old university student in October. According to the We Will Stop Femicide Platform, at least 235 women were killed by men between January and October, with an additional 247 women found dead in suspicious circumstances. Yet the right-wing nationalist government declared 2025 to be the ‘Year of the Family’, criticised by activists for reinforcing traditional roles instead of addressing women’s safety.

And in Latvia, parliament voted to withdraw from the Istanbul Convention, barely a year after ratifying it. Right-wing parties argued it promoted ‘gender theories’ under the guise of combating violence, and proceeded despite a petition against it that gathered over 60,000 signatures. The president sent the bill back to parliament for review, but if it passes, Latvia will be the first EU member state to quit the convention.

The 16 Days campaign highlights a fundamental truth: violence against women is not just a social problem but a violation of human rights. Its endpoint on Human Rights Day, established to commemorate the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, asserts that women’s rights are human rights and emphasises the demand that states fulfil their obligations under international law to prevent, investigate and punish GBV.

South Africa’s declaration proves that sustained collective action can force change. Women’s rights activists successfully leveraged the international spotlight of the G20 summit, staging a nationwide shutdown that saw thousands withdraw from paid and unpaid labour, refrain from spending money and lie in silent protest at noon. They forced the crisis onto the global agenda at a moment of unprecedented international attention.

Meeting even the most basic demands — the ability to walk home without fear, leave abusive partners, participate in politics without risking sexual violence, exist online without harassment — requires structural transformation. Women will only find safety when societies cease to view them as objects to possess and control, when those seeking to escape abuse have a path to economic independence, when judicial systems treat violence against women with the seriousness it deserves and when technology companies are held accountable for platforms that enable harassment.

The year revealed more regression than progress. Yet amid growing repression and dwindling resources, women’s movements persisted in documenting violence, supporting survivors, educating the public and advocating for systemic change. Their persistence reflects a clear understanding that real change demands sustained action. States have human rights obligations to protect women’s lives, and women’s movements will continue to insist these obligations are met with the seriousness and resources they require, one protest at a time.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Dec 22 2025 (IPS)

Myanmar is heading for an election, beginning on 28 December, that’s ostensibly an exercise in democracy – but it has clearly been designed with the aim of conferring more legitimacy on its military junta.

Almost five years after its February 2021 coup, the regime continues to fight pro-democracy forces and ethnic armed organisations, barely controlling a fifth of Myanmar’s territory. The junta has acknowledged that voting won’t be possible in much of the country.

The upcoming election fails every test of democratic legitimacy. The main democratic parties — the National League for Democracy and the Shan Nationalities League for Democracy — are banned. What remains is the Union Solidarity and Development Party, the military’s puppet party, plus minor groups that won no seats in the democratic election held in 2020. Independent media outlets have been crushed, journalists are arrested and intimidated daily and internet access is heavily restricted. In areas that resist military rule, civilians face escalating violence and arbitrary detention.

This election is designed not to reflect the popular will but to entrench military power. It comes as the regime continues its systematic campaign of violence against civilians: weeks before the junta announced the vote, Myanmar’s air force bombed a school in Oe Htein Kwin village, killing two teachers and 22 children, the youngest only seven years old.

The Assistance Association for Political Prisoners has confirmed 6,231 civilians have been killed by the military since the coup, though true figures could be much higher. Nearly half of all civilian deaths are estimated to have been caused by airstrikes. These are not indiscriminate military operations where civilians are collateral damage; they are deliberate attacks where civilians are the targets. The majority of locations of airstrikes have been sites with protected status under international law: camps for displaced people, churches, clinics and schools, often with no presence of armed groups nearby.

The junta has some powerful international allies. China backs it with billions in aid and advanced weapons. Russia supplies the fighter jets that drop bombs on civilians. India quietly sells arms. The three have long provided diplomatic cover and shielded the junta from international accountability. Meanwhile, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) continues pursuing its failed Five-Point Consensus agreed with the regime in April 2021, despite its systematic violation of every commitment. Regional powers have negotiated exclusively with the junta without input from the National Unity Government — the government in exile formed by democratically elected lawmakers — effectively treating the military regime as Myanmar’s legitimate rulers.

Now recent decisions by the Trump administration threaten to tip the balance decisively in favour of legitimising military rule. Trump has lifted sanctions, cut independent media funding and eliminated the protections formerly afforded to Myanmar’s refugees in the USA. Consistent with his transactional approach, he’s choosing access to rare earth minerals over democracy.

The concern now is that ASEAN member states may follow suit, using the sham election as justification to normalise relations with the military regime. Some have already started moving in this direction, with the junta leader invited to regional meetings.

Myanmar’s pro-democracy forces continue to resist despite the shifting international context. The People’s Defence Forces and ethnic armed groups maintain coordinated operations across most of the country. Civil society continues documenting violations, providing aid to displaced people and advocating for international action. They deserve better than to watch the world legitimise their oppressors.

The junta’s control on the ground remains tenuous, but its diplomatic position is strengthening. Whether this consolidation continues depends on how the world responds to the election. The international community must be clear that treating the election as legitimate would signal to authoritarians everywhere that democratic institutions can be overthrown with impunity, war crimes carry no real consequences and regimes that bomb schools and imprison elected leaders can secure international acceptance.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Dec 17 2025 (IPS)

Machines with no conscience are making split-second decisions about who lives and who dies. This isn’t dystopian fiction; it’s today’s reality. In Gaza, algorithms have generated kill lists of up to 37,000 targets.

Autonomous weapons are also being deployed in Ukraine and were on show at a recent military parade in China. States are racing to integrate them in their arsenals, convinced they’ll maintain control. If they’re wrong, the consequences could be catastrophic.

Unlike remotely piloted drones where a human operator pulls the trigger, autonomous weapons make lethal decisions. Once activated, they process sensor data – facial recognition, heat signatures, movement patterns — to identify pre-programmed target profiles and fire automatically when they find a match. They act with no hesitation, no moral reflection and no understanding of the value of human life.

Speed and lack of hesitation give autonomous systems the potential to escalate conflicts rapidly. And because they work on the basis of pattern recognition and statistical probabilities, they bring enormous potential for lethal mistakes.

Israel’s assault on Gaza has offered the first glimpse of AI-assisted genocide. The Israeli military has deployed multiple algorithmic targeting systems: it uses Lavender and The Gospel to identify suspected Hamas militants and generate lists of human targets and infrastructure to bomb, and Where’s Daddy to track targets to kill them when they’re home with their families. Israeli intelligence officials have acknowledged an error rate of around 10 per cent, but simply priced it in, deeming 15 to 20 civilian deaths acceptable for every junior militant the algorithm identifies and over 100 for commanders.

The depersonalisation of violence also creates an accountability void. When an algorithm kills the wrong person, who’s responsible? The programmer? The commanding officer? The politician who authorised deployment? Legal uncertainty is a built-in feature that shields perpetrators from consequences. As decisions about life and death are made by machines, the very idea of responsibility dissolves.

These concerns emerge within a broader context of alarm about AI’s impacts on civic space and human rights. As the technology becomes cheaper, it’s proliferating across domains, from battlefields to border control to policing operations. AI-powered facial recognition technologies are amplifying surveillance capabilities and undermining privacy rights. Biases embedded in algorithms perpetuate exclusion based on gender, race and other characteristics.

As the technology has developed, the international community has spent over a decade discussing autonomous weapons without producing a binding regulation. Since 2013, when states that have adopted the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons agreed to begin discussions, progress has been glacial. The Group of Governmental Experts on Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems has met regularly since 2017, yet talks have been systematically stalled by major military powers — India, Israel, Russia and the USA — taking advantage of the requirement to reach consensus to systematically block regulation proposals. In September, 42 states delivered a joint statement affirming their readiness to move forward. It was a breakthrough after years of deadlock, but major holdouts maintain their opposition.

To circumvent this obstruction, the UN General Assembly has taken matters into its hands. In December 2023, it adopted Resolution 78/241, its first on autonomous weapons, with 152 states voting in favour. In December 2024, Resolution 79/62 mandated consultations among member states, held in New York in May 2025. These discussions explored ethical dilemmas, human rights implications, security threats and technological risks. The UN Secretary-General, the International Committee of the Red Cross and numerous civil society organisations have called for negotiations to conclude by 2026, given the rapid development of military AI.

The Campaign to Stop Killer Robots, a coalition of over 270 civil society groups from over 70 countries, has led the charge since 2012. Through sustained advocacy and research, the campaign has shaped the debate, advocating for a two-tier approach currently supported by over 120 states. This combines prohibitions on the most dangerous systems — those targeting humans directly, operating without meaningful human control, or whose effects can’t be adequately predicted — with strict regulations on all others. Those systems not banned would be permitted only under stringent restrictions requiring human oversight, predictability and clear accountability, including limits on types of targets, time and location restrictions, mandatory testing and requirements for human supervision with the ability to intervene.

If it’s to meet the deadline, the international community has just a year to conclude a treaty that a decade of talks has been unable to produce. With each passing month, autonomous weapons systems become more sophisticated, more widely deployed and more deeply embedded in military doctrine.

Once autonomous weapons are widespread and the idea that machines decide who lives and who dies becomes normalised, it will be much hard to impose regulations. States must urgently negotiate a treaty that prohibits autonomous weapons systems directly targeting humans or operating without meaningful human control and establishes clear accountability mechanisms for violations. The technology can’t be uninvented, but it can still be controlled.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Nov 27 2025 (IPS)

Three years ago, Captain Ibrahim Traoré seized power in Burkina Faso with two promises that have proved hollow: to address the country’s deepening security crisis and restore civilian rule. Now he has postponed elections until 2029, dissolved the independent electoral commission and pulled the country out of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Burkina Faso has become a military dictatorship.

The journey began in January 2022, when protests over the civilian government’s failure to address jihadist violence opened the door for Lieutenant-Colonel Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba to seize power. Transitional authorities promised a return to democracy within two years, agreeing to a timeline with ECOWAS. But eight months later, Traoré led a second coup, accusing Damiba of failing to defeat insurgents.

When Traoré’s promised deadline of June 2024 approached, the military government convened a national dialogue that most political parties boycotted. The resulting charter extended Traoré’s presidency until 2029 and granted him permission to stand in the next election, transforming what was meant to be a transitional arrangement into consolidated personal power. The dismissal of Prime Minister Apollinaire Joachim Kyelem de Tambela and the dissolution of his government in December 2024 removed the pretence of civilian participation in governance.

As the military has entrenched its rule, civic freedoms have evaporated. The CIVICUS Monitor downgraded Burkina Faso’s civic space rating to ‘repressed’ in December 2024, reflecting the systematic silencing of dissent through arbitrary detention and a particularly sinister tactic: forced military conscription of critics. Four journalists abducted in June and July 2024 disappeared into the military, with authorities announcing they had been enlisted. In March 2025, three prominent journalists who spoke out against press freedom restrictions were forcibly disappeared for 10 days before reappearing in military uniforms, their professional independence erased at gunpoint.

Civil society activists have suffered similar fates. Five members of the Sens political movement were abducted after publishing a press release denouncing the killing of civilians. The organisation’s coordinator, human rights lawyer Guy Hervé Kam, has been repeatedly detained for criticising military authorities. In August 2024, seven judges and prosecutors investigating junta supporters were conscripted; six reported to a military base and have not been heard from since. This weaponisation of conscription transforms civic engagement into grounds for forced military service, effectively criminalising dissent while claiming to mobilise national defence.

Meanwhile the security situation that supposedly justified these coups has dramatically worsened. Deaths from militant Islamist violence have tripled under Traoré’s watch, with eight of the 10 deadliest attacks against the military occurring under his rule. Military forces now operate freely in as little as 30 per cent of the country. The military has committed mass atrocities: in the first half of 2024, military forces and allied militias killed at least 1,000 civilians. In one incident in February 2024, soldiers summarily executed at least 223 civilians, including 56 children, in apparent retaliation for an Islamist attack.

Conflict has displaced millions, with independent estimates placing the numbers of internally displaced people at between three and five million, far exceeding the government’s last official count of just over two million in March 2023. Some are fleeing across the border. Around 51,000 refugees arrived in Mali’s Koro Cercle district between April and September 2025, overwhelming host communities already struggling with fragile public services. Multiple concurrent epidemics, including hepatitis E, measles, polio and yellow fever, compound the humanitarian crisis in Burkina Faso.

To avoid accountability for these failures, the junta is withdrawing from international oversight. In January, following their joint exit from ECOWAS, which they characterised as being under foreign influence and failing to support their fight against terrorism, military-run Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger formed the Alliance of Sahel States. In September, the three juntas announced withdrawal from the ICC, mischaracterising the body that holds human rights abusers to account as a tool of neocolonial repression. These moves leave victims of extrajudicial killings, torture and war crimes with no realistic prospect of accountability.

The regime’s online propaganda machine has proved remarkably effective in justifying its intensifying repression. Traoré has cultivated an image as a young pan-African hero fighting western imperialism. To some young people across Africa and the diaspora, he represents the charismatic leadership needed to break with discredited politics and colonial relationships. This reputation is built on extensive disinformation that overstates progress, downplays human rights violations and portrays withdrawal from international institutions as bold resistance rather than an evasion of accountability.

The junta’s anti-imperialist rhetoric obscures a simple reality: it has replaced one troubling relationship with another. Having expelled French forces, Burkina Faso has turned to Russia for military support. Russian mercenaries now operate extensively alongside national forces, bringing no pressure to respect human rights while offering Vladimir Putin a shield from accountability for his war in Ukraine. The junta has recently granted a company linked to the Russian state a licence to mine gold.

Yet the democratic ideal survives. Civil society leaders continue to speak out, journalists continue to report and opposition figures continue to organise, despite the enormous personal risks. Their courage demands more than statements of concern.

In the face of the Trump administration’s sudden termination of USAID programmes, other international donors must step up and establish emergency funding mechanisms to support civil society organisations and independent media operating under severe restrictions in Burkina Faso or in exile. Regional institutions must impose targeted sanctions on officials responsible for human rights violations and maintain pressure for democratic restoration. Without sustained international solidarity with Burkina Faso’s democratic forces, the country risks becoming another cautionary tale of how military rule, once consolidated, proves extraordinarily difficult to reverse.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report. She is also a Professor of Comparative Politics at Universidad ORT Uruguay.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Irakli Gedenidze/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct 21 2025 (IPS)

When thousands of Georgians filled the streets of Tbilisi in 2023 to protest against their government’s proposed ‘foreign agents’ law, they understood what their leaders were trying to do: this wasn’t about transparency or accountability; it was about silencing dissent. Though the government was forced to withdraw the legislation, it returned with renewed determination in 2024, passing a renamed version despite even bigger protests. The law has effectively frozen Georgia’s hopes of joining the European Union.

Georgia’s repressive law is just one example of a disturbing global trend documented in CIVICUS’s new report, Cutting civil society’s lifeline: the global spread of foreign agents laws. From Central America to Central Asia, from Africa to the Balkans, governments are adopting legislation that brands civil society organisations and independent media as paid agents of foreign interests. Foreign agents laws are proliferating at an alarming rate, posing a growing threat to civil society. Since 2020, El Salvador, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Nicaragua and Zimbabwe have all enacted such laws, while many more states have proposed similar measures.

Russia established the blueprint for this architecture of repression in 2012, when Vladimir Putin’s government introduced legislation requiring any civil society organisation that received foreign funding and engaged in broadly defined ‘political activity’ to register as a foreign agent. This offered an impossible choice: accept a stigmatising designation that effectively brands organisations as foreign spies, or cease operations. Russia repeatedly expanded its crackdown, and by 2016, at least 30 groups had chosen to shut down rather than accept the designation. The European Court of Human Rights has unequivocally condemned Russia’s law as violating fundamental civic freedoms, yet this hasn’t prevented other states eagerly adopting the same model.

The pretence that these laws promote transparency is fundamentally disingenuous. Civil society organisations that receive international support are already subject to rigorous accountability requirements imposed by their donors. In contrast, governments often receive substantial foreign funding yet face no equivalent disclosure obligations. This double standard reveals the true purpose of these laws: not transparency, but control. In practice, almost any public interest activity can be deemed political under foreign agents laws, including human rights advocacy, election monitoring and efforts to strengthen democracy. States deliberately leave definitions vague and broad to allow discretionary enforcement and targeting of organisations they don’t like.

The impacts can be devastating. Nicaragua provides a particularly extreme example of the use of foreign agents laws to dismantle civil society. President Daniel Ortega has used such legislation as part of a comprehensive repressive arsenal that has shuttered over 5,600 organisations, roughly 80 per cent of all groups that once operated in the country. State security forces have raided suspended organisations, seized their offices and confiscated their assets, while thousands of academics, activists and journalists have been driven into exile. With only state-controlled organisations remaining operational, Nicaragua has become a full-blown authoritarian regime where independent voices have been eliminated and civic space has slammed shut.

In Kyrgyzstan, a foreign agents law passed in March 2024 has had an immediate chilling effect. Organisations have scaled back their activities, some have re-registered as commercial entities and others have proactively ceased operations to avoid fines for non-compliance. The Open Society Foundations closed its long-established grant-making office in the country. Meanwhile, in El Salvador, President Nayib Bukele’s government imposed a punitive 30 per cent tax on all foreign grants alongside stigmatising labels and registration requirements, forcing major civil society organisations to shut down their offices.

Foreign agents laws impose systematic barriers through complex registration processes, demanding reporting requirements and frequent audits that force many smaller organisations to close. The threat of harsh penalties – including heavy fines, licence revocations and imprisonment for non-compliance – creates a climate of fear that frequently leads to self-censorship and organisational dissolution. By restricting foreign funding while offering no measures to expand domestic funding sources, governments make civil society organisations dependent on state approval, curtailing their autonomy. And by forcing them to wear the stigmatising ‘foreign agent’ label, governments ensure they lose public trust, making it harder to mount a defence when further crackdowns follow.

Yet there are grounds for hope. Civil society has shown remarkable resilience in resisting foreign agents laws, and street mobilisation and legal challenges have sometimes stalled or rolled back these measures. Ukraine’s rapid reversal of its 2014 foreign agents law following mass protests showed that immediate pushback can come when the political moment is right. Ethiopia changed its restrictive 2009 law in 2019, while Hungary was forced to drop its 2017 law following a 2020 European Court of Justice ruling. In May 2025, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Constitutional Court suspended a foreign agents law, recognising it violated freedom of association.

International legal pressure has been vital. The European Court of Human Rights’ categorical condemnation of Russia’s legislation established crucial precedents. These decisions provided a foundation for challenging similar laws elsewhere. However, authoritarian governments may adapt their strategies and implement new versions of restrictive legislation, as seen in Hungary’s 2023 introduction of a new ‘sovereignty protection’ law.

The acceleration of this trend since 2020 reflects broader patterns of democratic regression around the world. Authoritarian political leaders are capitalising on legitimate concerns about foreign interference to create legal tools that serve their repressive agendas. The danger extends beyond current adopters. Bulgaria’s parliament has rejected foreign agents bills five times, yet a far-right party keeps reintroducing them. Turkey’s autocratic government shelved its proposed law following public backlash in 2024, only to reintroduce an amended version months later.

Coordinated resistance is essential before foreign agents laws become normalised. There’s an urgent need for international courts to expedite consideration of cases and develop emergency procedures for situations where civil society faces immediate threats. Democratic governments must avoid adopting stigmatising legislation, impose targeted sanctions on foreign officials responsible for enacting foreign agents laws and provide safe haven for activists forced to flee. Funders must establish emergency mechanisms with rapid-disbursement grants, while civil society must strengthen international solidarity networks to share resistance strategies and expose the true intent of these laws.

The alternative to coordinated action is to watch idly as independent voices are systematically silenced. Civil society’s right to exist and operate freely must be defended.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Pavel Bednyakov/Pool via Reuters

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Oct 3 2025 (IPS)

When Mali’s former Prime Minister Moussa Mara stood trial in Bamako’s cybercrime court on 29 September, charged with undermining state authority for expressing solidarity with political prisoners on social media, his prosecution represented far more than one person’s fate. It epitomised how thoroughly the military junta has dismantled Mali’s democratic foundations, five years after seizing power with promises of swift reform.

Just a week before Mara’s trial, Mali joined fellow military-run states Burkina Faso and Niger in announcing immediate withdrawal from the International Criminal Court (ICC). Although the withdrawal won’t take effect for a year and the ICC retains jurisdiction over past crimes, the message was unmistakable: Mali’s military rulers intend to operate beyond international legal constraints.

This follows a pattern of escalating repression, including arrests of senior generals and civilians over alleged conspiracy in August, coming months after sweeping decrees outlawed political parties and dissolved all organised opposition. Rather than preparing for the democratic handover initially promised for 2022 and repeatedly postponed, the junta is methodically shutting down what remains of Mali’s civic space.

A transition derailed

When General Assimi Goïta first seized power in August 2020 following mass protests over corruption and insecurity, he pledged to oversee a quick return to civilian rule. But less than a year later, he staged a second coup to sideline transitional civilian leaders. In 2023, the junta organised a constitutional referendum, claiming it would pave the way to democracy. The new constitution, supposedly approved by 97 per cent of voters, provided for significantly strengthened presidential powers while conveniently granting amnesty to coup participants. Deadlines for elections kept slipping, and they’re now effectively off the table until at least 2030.

A national consultation held in April, boycotted by virtually all major political parties, recommended appointing Goïta as president for a renewable five-year term until 2030, obviously contradicting any pledges to restore multi-party democracy.

An all-out assault on political parties ensued. Presidential decrees in May suspended all parties, revoked the 2005 Charter of Political Parties that provided the legal framework for political competition and dissolved close to 300 parties, forbidding all meetings or activities under threat of prosecution. Courts predictably rejected appeals, having become beholden to the executive under the 2023 constitutional changes that gave Goïta absolute control over Supreme Court appointments. The regime announced a new law on political parties to sharply restrict their number and impose stricter formation requirements, making clear it wants a tightly managed political landscape stripped of genuine pluralism.

Crushing civic freedoms

The assault on civic space extends beyond political parties. The junta has suspended civil society groups receiving foreign funding, imposed stringent regulatory controls and introduced draft legislation aimed at taxing civil society organisations. Independent media face systematic silencing through licence suspensions and revocations, astronomic increases in licence fees and weaponised cybercrime laws targeting journalists with vague charges such as undermining state credibility and spreading false information. Religious figures, opposition leaders and civil society activists have faced arrests, enforced disappearances and show trials.

The crackdown sparked the first major public resistance to military rule since 2020, with thousands protesting in Bamako in early May against the party ban and extension of Goïta’s mandate, only to be dispersed with teargas. Planned follow-up protests were cancelled after organisers received warnings of violent retaliation. The regime has made clear it won’t tolerate peaceful dissent.

What lies ahead

Five years after seizing power, Mali keeps taking the opposite path to democracy. The initial coup enjoyed some popular support, fuelled by anger at corruption and the civilian government’s failure to address jihadist insurgencies. But no improvements have come. Jihadist groups are still killing thousands every year, while the Malian army and its new Russian mercenary allies, following the departure of French and allied forces, routinely commit atrocities against civilians. Meanwhile the freedoms that would allow people to voice grievances and demand accountability have been systematically stripped away.

Mali’s trajectory matters beyond its borders. It was the first in a series of Central and West African countries to fall under military rule in recent years and is now spearheading a regional pushback against global democracy and human rights standards. The international community has responded with condemnations from UN human rights experts and documentation from civil society groups, but these statements carry little weight. Economic Community of West African States sanctions lost their leverage when Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger withdrew to form the rival Alliance of Sahel States, creating a bloc of authoritarian military regimes that coordinate to suppress dissent across borders, backed by stronger ties to Russia.

What began as a supposed corrective to civilian misrule has hardened into outright authoritarianism dressed in the language of national security and public order. The junta has eliminated any domestic institution that might constrain its power and is now casting aside even international accountability mechanisms.

In this bleak context, Malian civil society activists, journalists and opposition figures continue speaking out at tremendous personal risk. Their courage demands more than statements of condemnation. It calls for tangible support in the form of emergency funding, secure communication channels, legal assistance, temporary refuge and sustained diplomatic pressure. The international community’s commitment to human rights and democratic values, in Mali and across Central and West Africa, must translate into meaningful solidarity with those risking everything to defend them.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Head of Research and Analysis, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 19 2025 (IPS)

Thousands of Afghans who fled to the USA when the Taliban took over in August 2021 now face the prospect of deportation to countries they’ve never been to. People who risked everything to escape persecution, often because they helped US forces, now find themselves treated as unwanted cargo under the Trump administration’s anti-migration policy.

Trump’s expanded deportation programme targets an estimated 10 million foreign-born people who live in the USA but lack proper legal documentation. This includes people who entered the country without authorisation, whose visas have expired, who’ve had their asylum claims denied, whose temporary protected status has lapsed, or whose legal status has been revoked or suspended. Within a hundred days of Trump’s inauguration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had arrested over 66,000 people and removed over 65,000. Some 200,000 had been deported by August.

But the Trump administration isn’t simply removing undocumented immigrants to their countries of origin. It’s increasingly embracing a particularly cruel tactic: dumping people in distant countries they’ve no connection with. This deportation strategy shows how the US government is willing to flout basic humanitarian principles in pursuit of political goals.

The government has invoked an obscure immigration law to deport people to other countries, offering financial incentives or applying diplomatic pressure to compel states to accept US deportees. Around a dozen have recently accepted such deals, including Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Paraguay in the Americas, and Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda in Africa. This geographic spread dispels any pretence that the policy is about returning people to transit countries: it’s about finding anyone willing to accept money in exchange for unwanted human cargo.

The programme is nakedly transactional, with rewards taking the form of direct payments, trade concessions, sanctions relief and diplomatic benefits. Uganda signed a formal agreement with the US government amid US sanctions on government officials, suggesting it traded migrant acceptance for improved diplomatic relations and potential sanctions relief. Rwanda’s deal coincided with US-brokered talks over the Democratic Republic of the Congo conflict, indicating that the deportation agreement was being leveraged in unrelated diplomatic negotiations. It’s highly unlikely the US government will criticise the human rights records of repressive states such as El Salvador, Eswatini and Rwanda now it’s struck migration management deals with them.

Human rights flouted

Although the USA has a long history of outsourcing asylum processing, these practices have been taken to another level under Trump. The administration is prepared to deport people to war zones, authoritarian states and directly to prison. These arrangements violate core principles of international law, including the right to seek asylum and the prohibition against returning people to places where they’ll face danger.

A particularly shocking example involves Venezuelan deportees sent to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Centre, an overcrowded jail notorious for human rights abuses. In March, the US government accused 238 Venezuelan men of being gang members based on little more than tattoos and fashion choices to justify their expedited removal to this hellish facility. The administration agreed to pay El Salvador US$6 million to house deportees, effectively buying prison space for people whose only crime was seeking safety in the USA. These deportees were later returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap, raising further questions about the use of migrants as diplomatic pawns.

Trump’s approach isn’t limited to recent arrivals. Unlike previous policies focused on border enforcement, it targets longtime residents – people who’ve spent years building families, careers and community ties.

This has sparked unprecedented resistance. People have mobilised in ways that transcend traditional political divides, with teachers protecting students’ families, employers refusing to cooperate with raids, religious leaders offering sanctuary and neighbourhoods forming mutual aid networks and early warning systems.

In response to ramped-up ICE raids seeking to fulfil arrest quotas of 3,000 people a day, people have protested in cities across the USA. Resistance has been particularly intense in sanctuary cities such as Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco – primary targets for federal operations to arrest migrants. Civil society activists have confronted ICE agents, blocked deportation vehicles, protested at airports and launched boycott campaigns against companies profiting from deportations.

The scale of resistance has prompted an unprecedented federal military intervention, with the government illegally deploying over 4,000 national guard troops and 700 marines to Los Angeles.

A choice to be made

Trump’s policies are legitimising xenophobia and racism, poisoning political discourse and polarising society. When it’s the world’s most powerful democracy that treats refugees as tradeable commodities, it sends an unmistakable signal to all the world’s authoritarian leaders: human rights are negotiable.

The USA faces a choice between two different versions of itself. It can continue down the path of transactional cruelty, treating human beings as problems to be exported, empowering authoritarian regimes and undermining international law. Or it can fulfil its humanitarian and human rights obligations, provide safe and legal pathways for migration and help address the root causes that force people to flee their homes.

The USA must suspend all offshore migration management agreements, stop deporting asylum seekers to unsafe countries and countries they have no connection with and restore the principle that seeking safety isn’t a crime but a fundamental human right.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Advisor, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Pascal.Van, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Sep 2 2025 (IPS)

In late June, thousands flooded the streets of Lomé, Togo’s capital, presenting the ruling dynasty with its biggest challenge in decades.

The catalyst was constitutional manoeuvring by President Faure Gnassingbé to maintain his grip on power. In March 2024, his government pushed through constitutional amendments that transformed Togo from a presidential to a parliamentary system. This created a new position, the President of the Council of Ministers – effectively Togo’s chief executive – elected by parliament rather than by popular vote, and with no term limits. Gnassingbé assumed this new role in May, making it abundantly clear the changes were only about keeping him in power indefinitely.

This constitutional manoeuvre was the latest episode in a 58-year family saga that began when Faure’s father, Gnassingbé Eyadéma, seized power in a 1967 coup. For 25 years, the elder Gnassingbé ruled over a one-party state, staging ritual elections that reached absurd heights in 1986 when he claimed re-election with close to 100 per cent of votes on an implausible 99 per cent turnout. Even after nominal multiparty democracy arrived in 1992, elections remained charades with predetermined outcomes, as opposition parties faced systematic obstacles that made fair competition impossible.

When Eyadéma died in 2005, the military simply appointed his son Faure as successor, despite the constitution mandating immediate elections. International pressure forced a hastily organised vote, but this followed the familiar script of violence, fraud and repression. The pattern repeated in 2010, 2015 and 2020, with each election offering a veneer of legitimacy for continued authoritarian rule – and eliciting successive waves of protest that were either violently repressed or pre-emptively suppressed.

Now, two decades after Faure took power, this latest constitutional gambit has triggered the most significant challenge to his rule. The constitutional changes designed to keep him in power have instead galvanised opposition, creating a focal point for decades of accumulated grievances.

The current protests differ from their predecessors by being overwhelmingly led by young people who’ve never known any other leaders than the Gnassingbés. Raised on promises of multiparty democracy, they’ve witnessed systematic electoral fraud to perpetuate a government wholly unresponsive to their needs. They connect their daily struggles with unemployment, power outages and crumbling infrastructure with the long-term denial of their democratic freedoms.

The arrest in May of a popular rapper and TikToker, Aamron – for posting a video calling for street protests to coincide with Gnassingbé’s birthday on 6 June – galvanised discontent, turning simmering frustration into organised resistance. Aamron’s detention sparked the formation of the 6 June Movement (M66), led by young artists, bloggers, diaspora-based activists and civil society figures who rely heavily on social media to coordinate protests, bypassing state-controlled channels.

The government’s response, however, has followed a familiar path of authoritarian crackdown. In late June, security forces killed at least seven people, including 15-year-old Jacques Koami Koutoglo, and they’ve also used teargas, beatings and mass arrests against protesters. The regime has detained journalists, forced deletion of protest footage and imposed internet shutdowns during protests. It has suspended international media outlets including France 24 and RFI for their protest coverage. it has even issued international arrest warrants for M66 leaders based abroad, accusing them of terrorism and subversion.

Protests have continued despite repression. The leadership of young people, less intimidated by the security apparatus and better connected through social media, has allowed for the diversification of opposition tactics, with activists shifting between street protests, legal challenges and international advocacy as circumstances dictate. The diaspora is also playing a role, with Togolese communities abroad organising solidarity protests and advocating with international organisations for sanctions against the Gnassingbé regime.

Significant obstacles however remain. Gnassingbé controls all levers of power, including security forces, the electoral commission and the Constitutional Court. For a democratic transition to result, international pressure would need to intensify, including the imposition of targeted sanctions on regime officials and their economic interests. Regional bodies, particularly the Economic Community of West African States, would need to act, including by threatening to suspend Togo until democratic reforms are implemented.

Whether these protests trigger democratic change or become yet another chapter in the history of repressed dissent will ultimately depend on the ability of pro-democracy forces to sustain pressure and whether the international community finally decides to act. Gnassingbé’s constitutional manoeuvre may prove to be his final act, not because it succeeded in keeping him in power, but because it awakened a new generation. Togo’s young people have discovered the power of collective action—and that could prove decisive.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 28 2025 (IPS)

On 7 August, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights delivered a groundbreaking decision that could transform women’s lives across the Americas. For the first time in international law, an international tribunal recognised care as an autonomous human right. Advisory Opinion 31/25, issued in response to a request from Argentina, elevates care – long invisible and relegated to the private sphere – to the level of a universal enforceable entitlement.

The court’s decision emerged from a highly participatory process that included extensive written submissions from civil society, academics, governments and international organisations, plus public hearings held in Costa Rica in March 2024. The ruling validates what feminist activists have argued for decades: care work is labour with immense social and economic value that deserves recognition and protection.

Three dimensions of care

The statistics that informed this ruling tell a stark story. In Latin America, women perform between 69 and 86 per cent of all unpaid domestic and care work, hampering their careers, education and personal development. The court recognised this imbalance as a source of structural gender inequality that needs urgent state action.

The decision defines care broadly, covering all tasks necessary for the reproduction and sustenance of life, from providing food and healthcare to offering emotional support. It establishes three interdependent dimensions: the right to provide care, the right to receive care and the right to self-care.

The court interpreted the American Convention on Human Rights as encompassing the right to care, making clear states must respect, protect and guarantee this right through laws, public policies and resources. It outlined measures states should take, including mandatory paid paternity leave equal to maternity leave, workplace flexibility for carers, recognition of care work as labour deserving social protection and comprehensive public care systems.

Feminist advocacy vindicated

The court’s decision reflects the profound influence of feminist scholarship. For decades, feminist activists have insisted that care work, overwhelmingly performed by women, is invisible and undervalued despite being central to sustaining life and economies. The court’s recognition validates these arguments, affirming that care work isn’t a natural extension of women’s roles confined in the private sphere, but labour with immense social and economic value.

The court’s intersectional approach represents another crucial victory for feminist movements. The advisory opinion acknowledged that care burdens aren’t evenly distributed among women: Indigenous, Afro-descendant, migrant and low-income women face disproportionate responsibilities and multiple layers of discrimination. This recognition aligns with feminist movements’ emphasis on the ways gender, race, class and migration status intersect to shape inequality.

Significantly, the court explicitly connected self-care with access to sexual and reproductive health services, recognising that genuine wellbeing requires the ability to make free and informed decisions about pregnancy, childbirth, motherhood and bodily autonomy. It stressed that all people – including women, transgender people and non-binary people who can become pregnant – should be free from imposed mandates of motherhood or care.

Civil society’s crucial role

This victory belongs to civil society. Feminist and human rights organisations across Latin America campaigned to bring the issue before the court and provided crucial expertise. Groups such as ELA-Equipo Latinoamericano de Justicia y Género, Dejusticia, the Global Initiative for Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and Women in Informal Employment-Globalizing and Organizing submitted arguments and evidence that shaped the court’s reasoning.

Organisations documented the realities of women caring for incarcerated relatives, migrant women working care jobs in precarious conditions and communities lacking basic services such as water and sanitation that make unpaid care work even more burdensome. This helped ensure the court’s opinion reflected social realities rather than abstract principles.

The opinion’s transformative potential extends beyond gender equality. By recognising care as a universal human need, it positions it as a cornerstone of sustainable development. Investments in care infrastructure create jobs, reduce inequality and support women’s workplace participation while ensuring that children, older people and people with disabilities can live with dignity and autonomy.

The road to implementation

While advisory opinions aren’t binding, they carry considerable legal and political weight, setting regional standards that influence constitutional reforms, strategic litigation and policy development. This decision provides a blueprint for societies where care isn’t an invisible burden but a shared and supported responsibility.

However, feminist organisations have noted a crucial limitation: the court’s decision not to designate the state as the primary guarantor of care rights creates an ambiguity that risks allowing governments to offload duties onto families, perpetuating the inequalities the decision aims to address.

Civil society faces the crucial task of ensuring that implementation prioritises state responsibility. The test lies in transforming legal recognition into laws, policies and practices that reach those most in need. The struggle now shifts from the courtroom to the political arena. Feminist movements are already preparing strategic cases and launching campaigns to pressure governments to pass laws, allocate budgets and build required infrastructure.

States must pass laws recognising the right to care, design universal care systems, integrate time-use surveys into national accounts and build robust care infrastructure. Employers must adapt workplaces to recognise caregiving responsibilities. Civil society and governments must challenge gender stereotypes and engage men and boys in care work.

The Inter-American Court has shown what’s possible: societies where care is valued, supported and shared. For the millions of women across the Americas who have carried this burden in silence, the work of turning this historic recognition into lived reality begins now.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Aug 13 2025 (IPS)

When Kenita Placide co-founded United and Strong, St Lucia’s first LGBTQI+ organisation in 2001, death threats were routine. Over the years, several friends were murdered for being gay. But 24 years on, Kenita’s Caribbean island nation has become the latest to overturn a colonial legacy that criminalised LGBTQI+ people.

On 29 July, the Eastern Caribbean Supreme Court – a St Lucia-based regional court that serves nine countries and territories – declared sections 132 and 133 of St Lucia’s Criminal Code unconstitutional, effectively decriminalising consensual same-sex sexual activity. This made St Lucia the fifth Caribbean country in four years to achieve this legal breakthrough through the courts.

St Lucia’s victory demonstrates that civil society can keep making gains even in largely regressive times. It offers fresh hope for LGBTQI+ activists in the six countries of the Americas that criminalise same-sex relations: Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, St Vincent and the Grenadines and Trinidad and Tobago.

Colonial laws, contemporary resistance

All the criminalising countries in the Americas are part of the Commonwealth Caribbean, where the prohibition of consensual same-sex sexual activity remains an enduring legacy of British colonial rule.

Following independence in 1979, St Lucia retained criminal provisions that punished ‘buggery’ and ‘gross indecency’. Rather than liberalising these laws, a 2004 amendment expanded criminalisation to include sex between women, with jail sentences ranging from five to 10 years.

While prosecutions have been rare in recent decades, these laws have fostered stigma, legitimised prejudice and contributed to discrimination and violence against LGBTQI+ people. They’ve hindered access to essential services, particularly healthcare, and denied LGBTQI+ people full legal protection. Civil society has documented numerous instances of verbal harassment, physical abuse and discrimination in workplaces and public spaces.

The tide began to turn over the past decade. The Commonwealth Caribbean’s first public Pride event was held in Jamaica in 2015, marking the growing visibility of the LGBTQI+ movement. Laws began to change, starting with a successful court challenge in Belize in 2016.

Civil society’s strategic litigation

The legal challenge in St Lucia was spearheaded by the Eastern Caribbean Alliance for Diversity and Equality, founded by Kenita in 2016, and United and Strong, which evolved from an HIV/AIDS organisation into a human rights group documenting abuses, advocating for reforms and providing essential services.

Together, they brought the case as part of a Caribbean litigation strategy launched in 2019, filing challenges in four Eastern Caribbean countries – Antigua and Barbuda, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis and St Lucia – plus Barbados, which has its own court system. The lawsuit argued that virtually identical criminal provisions violated constitutional rights to privacy, equality and liberty. Positive rulings came for Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados and St Kitts and Nevis in 2022, while a separate legal challenge succeeded in Dominica in 2024.

St Lucia’s ruling was particularly significant given recent setbacks, including the recriminalisation of consensual same-sex relations in Trinidad and Tobago in March, reversing a 2018 court ruling, and the dismissal of challenges to anti-gay laws in St Vincent and the Grenadines last year.

The road ahead: from decriminalisation to equality

Legal reforms are still needed. While the 2006 Labour Code prohibits workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation and the 2022 Domestic Violence Act protects same-sex couples from abuse, significant gaps remain in housing and public services protection.

Future civil society advocacy is expected to focus on broader legal protections, marriage equality, adoption rights, recognition of non-binary genders, gender change procedures and banning harmful practices such as conversion therapy. But conservative religious groups, which hold significant sway in many Caribbean societies, are expected to resist further advances, which they frame as threats to traditional values. Experiences in Dominica and elsewhere suggest that backlash is likely.

Evidence indicates laws are moving faster than public opinion. St Lucia now ranks 154th out of 198 countries on Equaldex’s Equality Index, which rates countries according to their LGBTQI+ friendliness. But the index shows a significant gap between limited legal protections and broadly negative social attitudes, with legal rights scoring 46 out of 100 while public opinion lags at just 17 out of 100.

While governments and courts can advance recognition of LGBTQI+ rights through legislative and judicial reforms, deep-seated social prejudices may remain. Activists face a double challenge: pursuing legal victories while simultaneously engaging in the slower, more complex work of changing attitudes. Without this parallel effort, legal protections may fail to translate into genuine equality in daily life, leaving LGBTQI+ people formally protected but still vulnerable.

St Lucia’s LGBTQI+ rights activists still have much work ahead, but their approach – combining grassroots organising, strategic litigation, regional coordination and decades of persistence – offers a blueprint for others striving for rights. It proves that even in conservative contexts, civil society can achieve change by building coalitions and persisting over time. St Lucia has just offered fresh hope to embattled activists elsewhere in the Caribbean, and around the world.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 14 2025 (IPS)

Donald Trump’s bullying tactics ahead of NATO’s annual summit, held in The Hague in June, worked spectacularly. By threatening to redefine NATO’s article 5 – the collective defence provision that has anchored western security since 1949 – Trump won commitments from NATO allies to almost triple their defence spending to five per cent of GDP by 2035. European defence budgets will balloon from around US$500 billion to over US$1 trillion annually, essentially matching US spending levels.

This is a staggering shift. Some NATO members currently spend around 1.2 per cent of GDP on traditional defence items, making the leap to five per cent an extraordinary proposition. The UK alone is earmarking US$1.3 billion to restore tactical nuclear capabilities, while the European Union (EU) has approved a US$176 billion fund for joint defence projects. Member states will even be allowed to breach normal debt limits without penalty – a clear signal that defence spending now trumps all other priorities.

At a time when people across NATO countries struggle with living costs and feel public services have been cut to the bone, this remilitarisation threatens deeper economic insecurity. More military spending may mean less for education, healthcare and programmes supporting those most in need. The UK has already announced cuts to international aid, which a few years ago stood at 0.7 per cent of gross national income, to 0.3 per cent by 2027 to pay for defence, and other countries are following suit. The upshot will be a massive transfer of income from the world’s poorest people to politically powerful defence corporations, mostly based in the USA.

A further alarming aspect of NATO’s spending surge is what it lacks: meaningful transparency requirements or standardised oversight mechanisms. Defence procurement typically operates behind closed doors, so normal accountability rules don’t apply. Decisions are shrouded in secrecy, complex international supply chains make oversight harder and industry-government relationships blur ethical lines. The revolving door between officials and contractors compromises independent decision-making, while national security provides convenient cover for decisions that might not withstand public scrutiny.

Rapid spending increases will exacerbate these accountability problems. The pandemic showed that sudden shifts in state spending are rarely transparent and provide opportunities for corruption. As governments race to meet deadlines and pressure from Trump mounts to show immediate results, expedited procurement processes are likely to bypass normal checks and balances.

History offers sobering lessons. In Afghanistan, billions supposed to develop local defence capacity disappeared into ghost projects and phantom battalions. Corruption undermined military effectiveness by producing substandard equipment and compromising logistics networks, helping enable the Taliban’s rapid return to power. Ukraine’s experience provides another cautionary tale—despite intense international scrutiny since Russia’s invasion, it took years to root out corrupt networks that had captured large portions of the defence budget.

Meanwhile, Russia has spent decades honing its malign influence operations, using cash and networks of cronies to hollow out democratic processes in western states, including many NATO members. A defence spending boom with no accountability safeguards risks creating fresh vulnerabilities authoritarian states and organised criminal groups can exploit.

The solution is to democratise defence spending. Recent research on EU defence procurement reveals that more transparent military contracting consistently produces lower corruption levels. Countries with greater transparency spend money more efficiently, with fewer cost overruns and higher-quality equipment.

One of the most glaring gaps in NATO’s current approach is the absence of civil society from defence governance. Other government ministries routinely consult with civil society, but defence ministries make major spending decisions with minimal input from those who can ensure choices reflect real human security needs and democratic values.

Civil society organisations bring crucial capabilities governments often lack: the independence to ask difficult questions, the expertise to spot red flags in complex contracts and the persistence to follow money trails to politically sensitive destinations. Security encompasses more than troops and weapons – it includes building institutional resilience, defusing disinformation and strengthening democratic systems against attack, areas where civil society has much to contribute.

Effective oversight doesn’t mean revealing sensitive operational details or compromising security. It requires tracking financial flows, monitoring contractor performance and ensuring competitive bidding processes. Civil society groups have repeatedly demonstrated they can investigate defence spending without endangering national security.

Before the money starts flowing, NATO should establish a defence procurement transparency initiative that sets baseline standards for member states. This should include requirements for public disclosure of contract values and vendor selection criteria, covering procurement, exports, offset agreements and spending on AI, cyber capabilities and research and development. National parliaments must be empowered to scrutinise decisions, independent oversight bodies should be adequately resourced to follow the money and both should draw on civil society expertise.

Civil society needs to be protected and allowed access to monitor defence spending flows, and whistleblower protections for defence sector employees should be strengthened. As civil society organisations worldwide endure funding cuts, including because of the Trump administration’s evisceration of aid spending, any increase in defence spending mustn’t come at the cost of democracy and human rights.

NATO’s credibility, and ultimately its security, depends on reconciling human security with respect for democratic values. That will only be achieved if civil society is able to play its role.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, and Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, writer at CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 7 2025 (IPS)

When Bangladesh’s streets erupted in protest in mid-2024, few could have predicted how swiftly Sheikh Hasina’s regime would crumble. The ousting of the prime minister last August, after years of mounting authoritarianism and growing discontent, was heralded as a historic opportunity for democratic renewal. Almost a year on, the question remains whether Bangladesh is genuinely evolving towards democracy, or if one form of repression is replacing another.

The interim government, led by Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus, confronts enormous challenges in delivering meaningful change. While it has taken significant steps – releasing political prisoners, initiating constitutional reforms, signing international human rights treaties and pursuing accountability for past violations – persistent abuses, political exclusion and economic instability continue to cast long shadows over the transition. The coming months will prove decisive in determining whether Bangladesh can truly break from its authoritarian past.

From electoral fraud to revolution

The roots of Bangladesh’s current upheaval trace back to the deeply flawed general election of 7 January 2024. The vote, which saw Hasina’s Awami League (AL) secure a fourth consecutive term, was widely dismissed as a foregone conclusion. The main opposition Bangladesh Nationalist Party boycotted the election in protest at the government’s refusal to reinstate a neutral caretaker system.

The government unleashed an intense crackdown ahead of the vote. It imprisoned thousands of opposition activists and weaponised the criminal justice system to silence dissent, leading to deaths in police custody and enforced disappearances. This repression extended to civil society, with human rights activists and journalists facing harassment, arbitrary detention and violence. The government sponsored fake opposition candidates to create an illusion of competition, resulting in plummeting voter turnout and a crisis of legitimacy.

When opposition rallies occurred, they were met with overwhelming force. On 28 October 2023, police responded to a major opposition protest in Dhaka with rubber bullets, teargas and stun grenades, resulting in at least 16 deaths, with thousands injured and detained.

The situation deteriorated further after the election. In June 2024, the reinstatement of a controversial quota system for public sector jobs triggered mass student-led protests that would ultimately topple Hasina’s government. These protests rapidly evolved into a broader revolt against entrenched corruption, economic inequality and political impunity.

The government’s response was systematically brutal. According to a United Nations fact-finding report, between July and August security forces killed as many as 1,400 people, including many children, often shooting protesters at point-blank range. They denied the injured medical care and intimidated hospital staff. The scale of violence eventually led the military to refuse further involvement, forcing Hasina to resign and flee Bangladesh.

Reform efforts amid political discord

The interim government identified three core priorities: institutional reforms, trials of perpetrators of political violence and elections. Its initial months brought significant progress. The government released detained protesters and human rights defenders, signed the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearances and established a commission of inquiry into enforced disappearances.

This commission documented around 1,700 complaints and found evidence of systematic use of enforced disappearances to target political opponents and activists, with direct complicity by Hasina and senior officials. In October, the Bangladesh International Crimes Tribunal issued arrest warrants for Hasina and 44 others for massacres during the 2024 protests, although the tribunal has a troubled history and retains the death penalty, contrary to international norms.

The Constitution Reform Commission has proposed expanding fundamental rights, with a bicameral parliament and term limits for top offices. However, the process has been undermined by the exclusion of major political players – most notably the AL – and minority groups.

Political tensions escalated as the interim government faced mounting pressure to set a general election date. Opposition parties accused it of deliberate stalling. The army chief publicly demanded elections by the end of 2025, while student groups sought postponement until reforms and justice were secured. After initial uncertainty, the government announced the election would occur in April 2026.

The most dramatic escalation came in May, when the interim government banned all AL activities under the Anti-Terrorism Act following renewed protests. The Election Commission subsequently suspended the AL’s registration, effectively barring it from future elections and fundamentally altering Bangladesh’s political landscape.

Economic challenges compound these political difficulties. Bangladesh remains fragile after devastating floods in 2024, while the banking sector faces stress from surging non-performing loans. Inflation continues outpacing wage growth and economic austerity measures agreed with the International Monetary Fund have sparked fresh protests.

Authoritarian patterns persist

Despite promises of change, old patterns of repression prove stubborn. Human rights groups document ongoing security forces abuses, including arbitrary arrests of opposition supporters and journalists, denial of due process and continued lack of accountability for past crimes. In the first two months of 2025 alone, over 1,000 police cases were filed against tens of thousands of people, mainly AL members or perceived supporters. A February crackdown on Hasina’s supporters led to over 1,300 arrests.

Press freedom remains severely threatened. In November, the interim government revoked the accreditation of 167 journalists. Around 140 journalists viewed as aligned with the previous regime have faced charges, with 25 accused of crimes against humanity, forcing many into hiding. Attacks on media outlets continue, including vandalism of newspaper offices.

The draft Cyber Protection Ordinance, intended to replace the repressive Cyber Security Act, has drawn criticism for retaining vague provisions criminalising defamation and ‘hurting religious sentiments’ while granting authorities sweeping powers for warrantless searches. Rights groups warn this law could stifle dissent in the run-up to elections.

Uncertain path forward

Bangladesh’s journey demonstrates that democratic transitions are inherently difficult, nonlinear and deeply contested processes. Democracy isn’t a guaranteed outcome, but the chances improve when political leaders are genuinely committed to reform and inclusive dialogue, and political players, civil society and the public practise sustained vigilance.

While the interim government has achieved steps unthinkable under the previous regime, the persistence of arbitrary arrests, attacks on journalists and the exclusion of key political players suggests authoritarianism’s shadow still looms large.

The upcoming general election will provide a crucial test of whether Bangladesh can finally turn the page on authoritarianism. The answer lies in whether Bangladeshis across government, civil society and beyond are able to build something genuinely new. The stakes are high in a country where many have already sacrificed much for the promise of democratic freedom.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Cover photo by OHCHR

By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jul 2 2025 (IPS)

When tanks rolled through Myanmar’s streets in 2021, civil society groups worldwide sounded the alarm. When Viktor Orbán systematically dismantled Hungary’s free press, democracy activists demanded international action. And as authoritarianism returns to Tanzania ahead of elections, it’s once again civil society calling for democratic freedoms to be respected.

Around the world, authoritarian populists have learned to maintain democratic language and rituals while gutting democracy’s substance. They hold fraudulent elections with no real opposition and crack down on civil society when it tries to uphold democratic freedoms. As a result, more than 70 per cent of the world’s population lives in countries where civic space is routinely repressed.

In response, over 175 civil society organisations and 500 activists have united behind a demand to help improve respect for democratic freedoms, calling on the UN to establish a Special Rapporteur on Democracy.

The proposal isn’t coming from diplomatic corridors or academia; it’s a grassroots call from the frontlines of a global democratic struggle. Democracy defenders who face harassment, imprisonment and violence have identified a gap in international oversight that emboldens authoritarians and lets down those fighting for democratic rights when they most need support.

Critical blind spots

While the UN investigates everything from torture to toxic waste through specialised rapporteurs, democracy – supposedly a core UN principle – receives no systematic international oversight. This is a blind spot civil society wants to change.

Today’s threats to democracy are often more subtle than outright coups and blatant election rigging. Repressive leaders have mastered the art of legal authoritarianism, using constitutional amendments to extend term limits, judicial re-engineering to capture courts and media laws to silence critics, all while maintaining a facade of democratic governance.

In countries from Belarus to Venezuela, elections have been turned into elaborate ceremonies emptied of competition. Even established democracies face growing challenges, with foreign influence and disinformation campaigns documented across dozens of recent elections, often amplified by AI that creates deepfakes faster than fact-checkers can debunk them.

The rise of right-wing populism across Europe and in the USA shows how easily democratic processes can elevate leaders who systematically undermine democratic institutions from within, weaponising the law to concentrate executive authority, criminalise opposition and restrict civic space.

These evolving threats expose fundamental gaps in how the international community monitors and responds to democratic regression. The proposed UN Special Rapporteur on Democracy would help fill this gap: unlike current mandates that focus on specific rights, this role would examine how democratic systems function as a whole.

Existing UN Special Rapporteurs have recognised the urgent need for dedicated democracy oversight, with the Special Rapporteurs on freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, freedom of opinion and expression, and the independence of judges and lawyers highlighting how democratic backsliding undermines the rights they’re mandated to protect.

A democracy rapporteur could investigate the full spectrum of threats that escape international attention: how electoral systems become compromised through legal manipulation, how parliamentary oversight gets systematically weakened while maintaining constitutional appearances, how judicial independence is eroded through seemingly legitimate reforms, and how meaningful participation beyond elections gets stifled through bureaucratic restrictions.

Crucially, the mandate could document not just obvious authoritarian crackdowns but the subtler forms of democratic erosion that often escape international notice until democratic institutions are compromised, offering early warnings about gradual processes that transform vibrant democracies into hollow shells.

Legal foundations

The proposal builds on solid legal foundations. Article 21 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights establishes that ‘public authority must derive from the will of the people’, while article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights recognises every citizen’s right to participate in public affairs and vote in free, fair and clean periodic elections.

Regional mechanisms provide valuable precedents. The Inter-American Democratic Charter explicitly states that ‘the peoples of the Americas have a right to democracy and their governments have an obligation to promote and defend it’. Building on this, Guatemala has recently requested an advisory opinion to clarify whether democracy constitutes a fundamental human right and what tangible obligations this imposes on states.

These foundations provide an actionable definition of democracy that respects diverse democratic models while upholding universal principles, sidestepping cultural relativist arguments that some authoritarian governments use to avoid accountability.

Momentum building

The proposal has generated remarkable momentum. On the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a broad coalition of civil society groups and think tanks published a joint statement calling for the appointment of a UN Special Rapporteur on Democracy.

Civil society leadership reflects widespread frustration among democracy activists who work under increasingly dangerous conditions and demand better institutional responses. Budget-conscious states should find this proposal attractive given the remarkable cost-effectiveness of the UN mandates system. Following standard UN practice, the new position would be unpaid, relying on voluntary funding from supportive states.

During its recent 58th session, the UN Human Rights Council adopted a resolution on human rights, democracy and the rule of law, conferring multilateral legitimacy on governments that want to support stronger democracy oversight. The window for action is open, but it won’t stay open indefinitely.

A test for international institutions

No single initiative will reverse global democratic decline. But this new role would enable systematic documentation, trend spotting and the sustained international attention democracy defenders desperately need. The rapporteur could investigate not just obvious authoritarian crackdowns but early signs of subtler democratic erosion, while highlighting innovations and good practices that others could adapt.

The debate over a UN Special Rapporteur on Democracy offers a test of whether international institutions can adapt to contemporary challenges or will remain trapped in outdated approaches while democracy crumbles. Creating this mandate would communicate that the international community takes democratic governance seriously enough to monitor it systematically – a signal that matters to democracy activists who need international support and serves as a warning to authoritarian leaders who thrive when nobody is watching.

With hundreds of civil society groups leading this charge from the frontlines of democratic struggle, the question isn’t whether this oversight is needed, but whether the UN will act before it’s too late.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, and Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, writer at CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 30 2025 (IPS)

On 1 June, Mexico made history by becoming the only country in the world to elect all its judges by popular vote, from local magistrates to Supreme Court justices. This unprecedented process saw Mexican voters choose candidates for 881 federal judicial positions, including all nine Supreme Court justices, plus thousands at local levels across 19 states. Yet what the government heralded as a transformation that made Mexico the ‘the most democratic country in the world’ may turn out to be a dangerous deception.

Judicial independence under attack

The judicial election was the culmination of a controversial constitutional reengineering pushed through by former President Andrés Manuel López Obrador and embraced by his successor, President Claudia Sheinbaum.

The ruling National Regeneration Movement (Morena) party promoted the change as a bold democratic measure to eliminate corruption, increase transparency and make judges accountable to the people rather than political or economic elites. But this narrative masked a more troubling reality. The judicial overhaul was the final piece in a systematic assault on institutions that checked executive power during López Obrador’s presidency. Between 2018 and 2024, the National Electoral Institute faced repeated budget cuts and legislative attacks. The National Institute for Access to Public Information was eliminated in late 2024, leaving oversight of public information access in the hands of an executive-dependent secretariat.

The judiciary became a prime target after the Supreme Court repeatedly struck down López Obrador’s key legislative proposals as unconstitutional. The president responded with aggressive public criticism, accusing judges of corruption and cutting the judiciary’s budget. When the Supreme Court invalidated his attempt to put the civilian National Guard under military command, López Obrador declared the judiciary needed democratisation.

Following Sheinbaum’s landslide victory in June 2024, when she won with close to 60 per cent and Morena secured a supermajority in Congress, the outgoing government introduced constitutional amendments as part of ‘Plan C’, with judicial elections the centrepiece. Despite protests by judicial workers, students and opposition groups, the bill passed in September.

The new system replaced merit-based appointments with a process where candidates are pre-screened by Evaluation Committees controlled by the executive, legislative and judicial branches before facing popular election. Judicial terms have been shortened and aligned with political cycles, while judicial salaries are now tied to the president’s, effectively giving the executive control over judicial remuneration in violation of international standards requiring stable, politically independent judicial funding.

Another concerning development is the new Judicial Disciplinary Tribunal, whose five popularly elected members have broad powers to investigate and sanction judicial personnel through final, unappealable decisions. This tribunal threatens to become a tool of political intimidation against judges who rule against government interests, fundamentally undermining judicial independence.

Corrosive effect on rights

As it turned out, the judicial elections achieved only a 13 per cent voter turnout, light years from the 61 per cent who voted at the last general election. This suggested widespread public disconnection from the process, calling into question the democratic legitimacy its proponents claimed to seek. The complexity of choosing between so many unknown candidates appears to have deterred many voters.

Troublingly, dozens of candidates were identified as having potential ties to drug cartels, including the former defence lawyer for notorious drug lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán, who got elected in Chihuahua state. Vulnerability to criminal infiltration is particularly alarming given Mexico’s context, where political violence has reached unprecedented levels – with at least 32 candidates and 24 public officials murdered during the 2024 campaign – and where criminal organisations exercise de facto governmental control in many territories.

The international community has responded with condemnation. The Rule of Law Impact Lab at Stanford Law School joined the Mexican Bar Association in filing an amicus curiae – friend of the court – brief before the Mexican Supreme Court challenging the reform’s constitutionality. The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights expressed ‘grave concern’ about judicial independence, access to justice and the rule of law. These concerns were echoed by United Nations Special Rapporteur on the independence of judges and lawyers and the International Bar Association.

The judicial elections will likely have a corrosive effect on democracy and human rights. By making judges accountable to popular majorities rather than constitutional principles, the new system will likely weaken protection for excluded groups including women, migrants and Indigenous communities who depend on judicial intervention for protection against discrimination.

Early analysis suggests that judges aligned with the ruling party performed well in the elections, potentially giving Morena unprecedented influence over judicial decision-making. From the government’s perspective, the elections appear to have achieved their underlying political objective: consolidating control across all branches of government. This eliminates the accountability mechanisms needed to prevent authoritarian drift.

Mexico’s experience highlights the dangerous tension between populism and constitutional democracy. With fewer institutional barriers remaining to prevent further concentration of power, the country’s democratic institutions now face their greatest test. For the rest of the world, Mexico offers a cautionary tale about how populist claims to democratic legitimacy can systematically undermine the institutional foundations democracy depends on.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 25 2025 (IPS)

Poland’s embattled Prime Minister Donald Tusk emerged bruised but still standing after his government survived a parliamentary vote of confidence on 11 June. He’d called the vote, which he won by 243 to 210, just days after the presidential candidate of his Civic Platform (PO) party suffered an unexpected defeat.

Karol Nawrocki, an independent nationalist conservative backed by the former ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) defeated liberal pro-European Union (EU) Warsaw Mayor Rafał Trzaskowski in a nail-biting presidential runoff. The result offers a broader test of Poland’s democratic resilience that could have implications across the EU.

The electoral blow

Nawrocki’s path to victory was anything but predictable. The 42-year-old former president of Poland’s Institute of National Remembrance had never held elected office before emerging as PiS’s chosen candidate. Yet his populist message resonated with frustrated voters.

Economic grievances provided fertile ground for nationalist appeals. Despite Poland’s relatively low unemployment, youth unemployment of over 10 per cent is an understandable source of anxiety for younger voters. Increasingly, they’re reacting by rejecting mainstream political offerings.

This helped cause the fragmented results of the 18 May first round. Trzaskowski won only 31.36 per cent of the vote and Nawrocki took 29.54 per cent. The combined vote share of right-wing candidates – Nawrocki and far-right politicians Grzegorz Braun and Sławomir Mentzen – exceeded polling expectations. Braun and Mentzen took over 21 per cent between them, thanks to the support of many young voters.

The 1 June runoff saw Nawrocki win 50.89 per cent to Trzaskowski’s 49.11 per cent, a margin of under two percentage points. Nawrocki took 64 per cent of the rural vote while Trzaskowski commanded 67 per cent in urban centres – an established geographic divide that reflects an enduring ideological division between a conservative, nationalist Poland and its liberal, cosmopolitan counterpart.

Election interference

Disinformation is helping fuel polarisation. The election campaign unfolded against a backdrop of foreign interference concerns that echoed troubling developments across the region – particularly in Romania, where the Supreme Court cancelled the 2024 presidential election due to evidence of Russian interference.

Just days before the first round, Poland’s Research and Academic Computer Network discovered evidence of potentially foreign-funded Facebook ads targeting all major candidates. According to an investigation by fact-checking organisation Demagog, TikTok was flooded with disinformation, particularly but not exclusively against Trzaskowski. The platform’s algorithm displayed far-right content twice as often as centrist or left-wing content to new users, with pro-Nawrocki videos appearing four times more frequently than pro-Trzaskowski content. Over 1,200 fake accounts systematically attacked Trzaskowski, while another 1,200 promoted Nawrocki.

The influence operation extended beyond individual character assassination to sowing distrust in the democratic process and sharing broader far-right narratives. Fake accounts systematically promoted anti-Ukrainian sentiment and anti-immigration conspiracy theories.

Donald Trump also gave Nawrocki an unprecedented level of support: he received him at the White House just before the election and sent his Homeland Security Secretary to campaign for him in Poland as she attended the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). This year, CPAC, a US conservative platform, held two international events, in Hungary and Poland. The Polish one, timed to coincide with the runoff, offered a clear indication of how the nationalist far right has become internationalised.

Institutional paralysis

The viability of Tusk’s ideologically diverse coalition and his own political future have been called into question by the result. With critics in the Civic Coalition blaming the election defeat on the government’s communication failures and Tusk’s personal unpopularity, the confidence vote became a key test.

But even though Tusk has survived the confidence vote, it will be a tall order to implement the reforms needed to restore the democratic institutions that came under strain during the PiS administration. In eight years in power, PiS dismantled judicial independence, made public media its propaganda mouthpiece and undermined women’s rights by introducing one of Europe’s harshest anti-abortion laws. The new government’s attempts to reckon with this legacy had already been hampered by outgoing President Andrzej Duda, who used his veto power to block key reforms. Nawrocki will continue that, leaving Tusk unable to realise his promises to Polish voters and the EU.

The European Commission had counted on Tusk completing promised judicial reforms as it unlocked billions in pandemic recovery funds frozen over rule-of-law concerns during PiS rule. With progress now unlikely, the Commission faces the difficult decision of whether to maintain its funding even if the government’s unable to deliver promised changes.

Beyond the EU, Nawrocki’s foreign policy positions threaten to complicate Poland’s previously staunch backing of Ukraine. Although supportive of continued aid, Nawrocki has pledged to block any prospects of Ukraine joining NATO and prioritise Polish interests over refugee support.

High stakes

The razor-thin margin of victory in the presidential election, combined with record turnout of 72.8 per cent, tells a complex story of a divided society. While high participation suggests robust civic engagement, the deep polarisation reflected in the results reveals faultlines that extend far beyond conventional political disagreements.

The outcome offers further evidence that, when economic grievances aren’t addressed, institutional trust is allowed to erode and information environments are left vulnerable to manipulation, opportunistic politicians will exploit social divisions and anti-establishment anger.

For Poland, the coming years will test whether democratic institutions can withstand the pressures of sustained political deadlock. Poland faces potential institutional paralysis that could further erode public trust in democratic governance. Poland’s institutions will need to try to demonstrate their continuing effectiveness, and civil society and independent media will need to maintain their credibility, to help protect and nurture democratic values.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 16 2025 (IPS)

At a White House meeting, presidents Nayib Bukele and Donald Trump exchanged praises and joked about mass incarceration while discussing an unprecedented agreement: the USA would pay El Salvador US$6 million a year to house deportees – of any nationality, potentially including US citizens – in its Centre for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT), a notorious mega-prison. This agreement marked the evolution of Bukele’s authoritarian model from a domestic experiment to an exportable commodity for strongmen worldwide.

Shortly after Trump’s inauguration, Bukele had tweeted an offer to help the US outsource its incarceration system. Less than six weeks later, hundreds of Venezuelan deportees were sent to CECOT under the 1798Alien Enemies Act. Among them was Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man who’d lived in Maryland for 15 years and was deported despite being granted protections by a US immigration judge. When the US Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return, Bukele refused on the grounds that he wouldn’t ‘smuggle a terrorist into the United States’. For Trump, this was one of the perks of having an ally who disregards the rule of law as much as he does.

Bukele’s path to authoritarianism

Bukele’s systematic assault on democracy began after his 2019 election victory, when he broke from El Salvador’s traditional two-party system and secured 53.4 per cent of the vote. The first significant sign of his willingness to ignore democratic norms came when the opposition-controlled Legislative Assembly refused to approve a multi-million-dollar loan for his security and anti-gang programme. Bukele called on supporters, police and the army to pressure legislators.

In the 2021 legislative election his party won a supermajority, enabling him to pass any laws and dismiss the judges who’d declared policies unconstitutional, appointing compliant replacements who gave him the green light to run for an unconstitutional second term.

The cornerstone of Bukele’s authoritarian project was his March 2022 declaration of a state of emergency following a spike in gang killings. Initially presented as temporary, the state of emergency has been repeatedly renewed and expanded into a new normal where constitutional rights, including due process, legal defence and freedom of assembly, no longer exist.

Bukele’s security policy involves massive deployment of security forces to ‘extract’ suspected gang members and jail them for life in extremely overcrowded conditions with no visits or rehabilitation programmes. This approach has led to the warrantless detention of over 80,000 people, giving El Salvador the world’s highest incarceration rate. Visible gang activity has dramatically fallen and the homicide rate plummeted from 105 per 100,000 people in 2015 to 1.9 in 2024, earning Bukele high approval ratings and re-election with 85 per cent of the vote. But the human rights cost has been devastating.

Since his unconstitutional re-election, Bukele has accelerated his institutional dismantling. On 29 January, the Legislative Assembly ratified a constitutional amendment eliminating the previous requirement that constitutional amendments be ratified by two successive legislatures. Bukele can now change the constitution without proper consultation and debate. Safeguards protecting key constitutional norms, including those prohibiting presidential re-election, have been removed.

Constitutional manipulation has been accompanied by judicial capture. In September 2024, the Legislative Assembly elected seven new Supreme Court judges, despite civil society criticism of the lack of procedural transparency and concerns about the candidates’ lack of independence.

Civic space under assault

The deterioration of civic space has been equally systematic, with the state intensifying its criminalisation of activists. In March 2024, Verónica Delgado was arbitrarily detained and charged with ‘unlawful association’ for her work as a member of the Search Block group, which searches for relatives who’ve disappeared under the state of emergency. In February 2025, at least 21 activists and civil society leaders were arbitrarily detained in coordinated operations. Among them was Fidel Zavala, spokesperson for the human rights organisation Unit for the Defence of Human and Community Rights, who’d recently filed a complaint against prison authorities citing cases of torture.

Bukele’s assault on press freedom has reached unprecedented levels. The Association of Journalists of El Salvador recorded 466 cases of attacks against journalists in 2024. Bukele has directly targeted independent media, using his Twitter/X account to discredit El Faro, a digital news outlet that investigated COVID-19 procurement contracts. Physical intimidation has escalated, with police raiding journalist Mónica Rodríguez’s home in December 2024, seizing hard drives and USB devices without a search warrant or any legal explanation.

State surveillance has become systematic and brazen. In November 2024, the Legislative Assembly adopted two laws on cybersecurity and data protection that grant authorities broad powers to remove online content and demand deletion of material deemed ‘inaccurate’, paving the way for systematic censorship.

The latest civic space attack is a Russian-inspired Foreign Agents Law passed in May, requiring anyone receiving foreign funding to register with a Registry of Foreign Agents. It imposes a punitive 30 per cent tax on all foreign payments and grants the authorities sweeping powers to approve, deny or revoke registrations. This is a devastating blow because most Salvadoran organisations depend on foreign donations and many have been critical of Bukele’s human rights violations, making them vulnerable to being labelled political threats.

Authoritarianism for export

Bukele’s model has attracted admirers worldwide. His re-election was hailed by many who seek to emulate him, and he receives sky-high approval ratings in other countries in the region, particularly those enduring rising crime.

The Trump-Bukele deportation agreement is the most visible manifestation of authoritarian collaboration, but the partnership extends beyond immigration policy. Trump has expressed admiration for Bukele’s methods, recently announcing plans to rebuild and reopen Alcatraz Island, arguing the notorious prison would help circumvent judges that fail to do his bidding. Bukele has encouraged Trump’s defiance of judges, calling legal challenges to Trump’s policies ‘a judicial coup’ and urging Republicans to remove what he calls ‘corrupt judges’. Trump must find Bukele’s systematic dismantling of civil society inspiring, viewing his criminalisation of activists and silencing of independent media as effective tools for consolidating power.

The international community’s response has been muted, reflecting the dilemma posed by Bukele’s genuine popularity and security achievements. The enthusiasm with which international observers have embraced what they see as Bukele’s success story demonstrates the dangerous appeal of authoritarian responses to complex social problems. His ability to achieve genuine, if not necessarily long-lasting, security improvements while systematically dismantling democratic institutions offers a seductive blueprint for other leaders frustrated by the constraints of democratic governance.

Bukele’s transformation of El Salvador from a fragile democracy into an authoritarian state is one of the most dramatic examples of democratic backsliding in contemporary Latin America, serving as a warning about the fragility of democratic institutions and an indication of how authoritarianism can adapt and spread. When Salvadorans eventually seek alternatives to Bukele’s increasingly repressive rule, they’ll face the struggle of having to repair the democratic machinery necessary for peaceful political change.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Jun 5 2025 (IPS)

For decades, Portugal stood as a beacon of democratic stability in an increasingly unsettled Europe. While neighbours grappled with political fragmentation and the rise of far-right movements, Portugal maintained its two-party system, a testament to the enduring legacy of the 1974 Carnation Revolution that peacefully transitioned the country from dictatorship to democracy. It was long believed that Portugal’s extensive pre-revolution experience of repressive right-wing rule had effectively inoculated it against far-right politics, but that assumption is now demonstrable outdated. An era of exceptionalism ended on 18 May, when the far-right Chega party secured 22.8 per cent of the vote and 60 parliamentary seats, becoming the country’s main opposition force.

This represents more than an electoral upset; it marks the collapse of five decades of democratic consensus and Portugal’s reluctant entry into the European mainstream of political polarisation. Chega could hold the balance of power. The centre-right Democratic Alliance, led by Prime Minister Luís Montenegro, won the most parliamentary seats, but fell far short of the 116 needed for a majority. Meanwhile, the Socialist Party, which governed from 2015 to 2024, suffered its worst defeat since the 1980s, relegated to third place by a party that’s only six years old.

Chega’s meteoric rise from just 1.3 per cent of the vote and one seat in 2019 to its role as today’s main opposition demonstrates how quickly political landscapes can shift when mainstream parties fail to address people’s fundamental concerns. The roots of the transformation lie in a toxic combination of economic pressure and political failure that has systematically eroded public confidence in the political establishment.

Portugal has endured three elections in under four years, a sign of its novel state of chronic instability. The immediate trigger for the latest election was the collapse of Montenegro’s government following a confidence vote, with opposition parties citing concerns over potential conflicts of interest involving his family business. This followed the previous Socialist government’s fall in November 2023 amid corruption investigations, creating a recurring cycle of scandal, government crisis and electoral upheaval.

The political turmoil unfolds against a backdrop of mounting social challenges that mainstream parties have failed to adequately address. Despite its economy growing by 1.9 per cent in 2024, well above the European Union average, Portugal faces a severe housing crisis that has become the defining issue for many voters, particularly those from younger generations. Portugal now has the worst housing access rates of all 38 OECD countries, with house prices more than doubling over the past decade.

In Lisbon, rents have jumped by 65 per cent since 2015, making the capital the world’s third least financially viable city due to its punishing combination of soaring housing costs and traditionally low wages. This crisis, driven by tourism, foreign investment and short-term rentals, has pushed property ownership beyond most people’s reach, creating widespread frustration with governments perceived as ineffective or indifferent to everyday struggles.

Immigration has provided another flashpoint. The number of legal migrants tripled from under half a million in 2018 to over 1.5 million in 2025. This rapid demographic change has fuelled populist narratives about uncontrolled migration and its alleged impact on housing and employment markets. It was precisely these grievances that Chega, led by former TV commentator André Ventura, expertly exploited.

As an outsider party untainted by association with the cycle of scandals and governmental collapses, Chega positioned itself as the defender of ‘western civilisation’ and channelled anti-establishment anger into electoral success. It combines promises to combat corruption and limit immigration with a defence of what it characterises as traditional Portuguese values, including through extreme criminal justice policies such as chemical castration for repeat sexual offenders.

Despite Ventura’s insistence that Chega simply advocates equal treatment without ‘special privileges’, the party’s ranks include white supremacists and admirers of former dictator António Salazar. Its openly racist approach to immigration and hostility towards women, LGBTQI+ people, Muslims and Roma people reflects a familiar far-right playbook that has proven successful across Europe. Chega has cultivated significant connections with Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Germany’s Alternative for Germany, and Spain’s Vox party, and Ventura was among the European far-right leaders invited to Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Montenegro has so far refused to work with Chega, which he has publicly characterised as demagogic, racist and xenophobic – a rejection that may have inadvertently strengthened Chega’s anti-establishment credentials. However, the arithmetic of Portugal’s fractured parliament suggests that any significant policy initiatives will require either Socialist abstention or, more controversially, Chega support, creating new opportunities for far-right influence, particularly on criminal justice and immigration policies.

Portugal’s experience offers sobering evidence that far-right influence should no longer be viewed as a passing fad but rather as an established feature of contemporary European politics. The speed of the shift offers a stark reminder that no democracy is immune to the populist pressures reshaping the continent.

The question now is whether Portugal’s institutions can adapt to govern effectively in this new fractured landscape while preserving democratic values. Portugal’s civil society has an increasingly vital part to play in holding newly influential far-right politicians to account and offering collective responses to populist challenges.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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Credit: Andreea Campeanu/Reuters via Gallo Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 27 2025 (IPS)

On 6 December 2024, Romania’s Constitutional Court made an unprecedented decision: with just two days to go before a presidential runoff expected to bring a far-right, Russia-sympathising candidate to power, the court took the extraordinary step of annulling the election due to evidence of massive Russian interference. It was the first time an EU member state has cancelled an election over social media disinformation. It may not be the last.

Romania’s six-month electoral crisis, which finally concluded on 18 May with centrist Nicușor Dan’s runoff victory over far-right nationalist George Simion, offers both a stark warning and a glimmer of hope for democracies worldwide. The crisis began when Călin Georgescu, an obscure far-right candidate who’d consistently polled in single figures, shocked the political establishment by coming first in the November 2024 presidential first round with close to 23 per cent of the vote. A NATO-sceptic and Russia sympathiser, Georgescu benefited from what was later revealed to be a sophisticated disinformation campaign orchestrated by a ‘state actor’ widely understood to be Russia.

The interference wasn’t crude or obvious. Russia had spent years building a meticulously designed disinformation ecosystem, exploiting many Romanians’ deep-seated frustrations with economic hardship, widespread corruption and political stagnation. With over 22 per cent youth unemployment, wages among the EU’s lowest and trust in institutions at historic lows, Romania presented fertile ground for anti-establishment appeals. The timing of the interference was surgical: it was activated at the most politically opportune moment to maximise impact.

What distinguished Romania’s experience from previous Russian interference campaigns in votes from Brexit and Donald Trump’s first victory to elections in nearby Georgia and neighbouring Moldova was that authorities identified and acknowledged the manipulation while the electoral process was still live. Declassified intelligence documents revealed a massive campaign on TikTok, including AI manipulation and bot-driven activity, designed to tilt the election in Georgescu’s favour. Disinformation exploited legitimate grievances to seed elaborate conspiracy theories that portrayed Romania as a victim of EU, NATO and western elites. The European Commission subsequently launched proceedings against TikTok for failing to properly assess and mitigate risks to election integrity.

Both the first-round results and the court’s decision to annul the election triggered protests that laid bare Romania’s deep social divisions. Immediately after the results were announced, thousands of students and young people gathered in Bucharest’s University Square chanting ‘No fascism, no war, no Georgescu!’. When the election was cancelled, Georgescu’s supporters denounced it as a manoeuvre to prevent their victory. Amid intense polarisation, authorities arrested several armed men heading to Bucharest to participate in protests with axes, guns, knives and machetes in their vehicles.

When the rescheduled election took place in May 2025, it delivered another dramatic upset. With Georgescu barred from running, George Simion of the Alliance for the Unity of Romanians emerged as the far-right standard-bearer, winning the first round with almost 41 per cent of the vote. The runoff became a referendum on Romania’s future direction: on whether it would continue its European orientation or pivot towards the regressive, Moscow-friendly stance taken by leaders of countries such as Hungary and Slovakia.

Russia’s disinformation campaign didn’t stop with the election annulment. Instead, it redoubled its efforts to sow distrust and further polarise voters, including through AI-generated smear campaigns against Dan.

Dan’s victory with almost 54 per cent of the vote provided reassurance to Romania’s western partners, but the margin was uncomfortably narrow. More troubling still, Simion refused to accept defeat, challenging the results at the Constitutional Court on unsubstantiated grounds of electoral fraud and alleging ‘foreign interference’ by France, Moldova and ‘others’. When the court quickly threw out his case, Simion called his defeat a coup, echoing dangerous Trump-like rhetoric that is becoming all too common around the world.

Romania’s experience exposes both the resilience and fragility of democracy in the digital era. The institutional response – from the Constitutional Court’s decisive action to civil society’s mobilisation – showed that democratic safeguards can function under extreme pressure. Yet the fact that around 40 per cent of voters backed far-right politicians reveals the depth of public disillusionment.

Many Romanians still feel cheated and denied their say. This sense of grievance provides fertile ground for divisive narratives to take deeper root, while neither the economy nor politics are currently in good enough shape to deliver on people’s rightful expectations.

Romania’s electoral saga serves as a cautionary tale. It points at both the vulnerabilities that can be exploited and the defences that can be mounted. Sophisticated disinformation campaigns can indeed be identified and countered – but only through vigilant institutions, engaged civil society and citizens committed to democratic values. The price of failure isn’t just political crisis but lasting damage to the foundations of democracy.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 16 2025 (IPS)

Three catastrophic events in the Balkans have sparked powerful movements for systemic change. A train collision that killed 57 people in Greece, a nightclub fire that claimed 59 young lives in North Macedonia and a collapsed railway station roof that left 15 dead in Serbia have ignited sustained anti-corruption protests in all three countries. These weren’t random tragedies but the culmination of systemic failure – neglected safety regulations, illegally issued permits and compromised oversight – with corruption the common denominator.

Young people, particularly students, stand at the forefront of these movements, alongside victims’ families who’ve become powerful advocates for change. In Greece, the Association of Relatives of Tempi Victims has emerged as a legitimate voice demanding accountability. North Macedonia’s protests have united citizens across economic and political divides, channelling widespread disillusionment with limited youth prospects and endemic corruption. Serbia’s movement has achieved remarkable geographic reach, spreading to some 400 cities and towns with innovative tactics like ‘half-hour noise’ protests following moments of silence for victims.

All three countries became democracies within living memory: Greece democratised five decades ago when its military junta collapsed, while North Macedonia and Serbia emerged from Communist Yugoslavia after its 1990 dissolution. Today, profound disillusionment pervades these societies. Clientelism, corruption and patronage flourish, effectively placing state functions at the service of elite interests rather than public needs. In Serbia, and to a lesser extent in North Macedonia, governments have also taken authoritarian turns. The most deeply disappointed are young people who grew up after democratic transitions and were taught to expect better.

The human cost of corruption

Greece’s February 2023 railway tragedy revealed a system crippled by chronic underinvestment and maintenance failures linked to corrupt contracting practices. In the face of official denials and inaction, private investigators hired by victims’ families discovered many initially survived the crash, only to perish in the subsequent fire, possibly caused by undeclared flammable chemical cargo.

In North Macedonia, the Pulse nightclub that caught fire this March was a disaster in waiting: a converted factory with only one viable exit, locked emergency doors, highly flammable materials and no fire safety equipment, operating with an illegally issued licence.

Serbia’s Novi Sad railway station, where a canopy collapsed in November 2024, had just been renovated under confidential contracts with Chinese companies. The tragedy was preventable, but corner-cutting maximised profits at the expense of safety.

In all three cases, excessive private influence over government decisions sacrificed public safety for private gain. Warning signs had repeatedly been flagged by civil society groups, journalists and opposition politicians, only to be ignored. A protest slogan in North Macedonia powerfully captured this view: ‘We are not dying from accidents, we are dying from corruption’. The same sentiment echoed in a Greek protest slogan, ‘Their policies cost human lives’ and a Serbian message to the authorities: ‘You have blood on your hands’. Another popular Serbian protest motto, ‘We are all under the canopy’, conveyed a general sense of shared vulnerability from corrupt governance structures.

Demands and responses

Protesters across all three countries share strikingly similar demands: accountability for those directly responsible and officials who enabled safety violations, transparent investigations free from political influence and systemic reforms to address corruption’s root causes. They recognise that democracy requires functioning accountability mechanisms beyond elections, in the form of institutionalised checks and balances and public oversight.

Government responses have taken a predictable course: minor concessions followed by attempts to manage rather than meaningfully address public anger.

North Macedonia’s interior minister was quick to admit the nightclub’s licence was illegally issued and the authorities ordered the detention of 20 people, including the club manager and government officials. But protesters saw these actions as scapegoating rather than genuine reform. In Greece, following the train crash initially blamed on a ‘tragic human error‘, the transport minister resigned, but investigations progressed at a glacial pace amid accusations of evidence cover-ups and avoidance of political responsibility. Serbia’s government initially released some classified documents and promised to address protesters’ demands, yet as protests persisted, President Aleksandar Vučić shifted to confrontational rhetoric, accusing protesters of orchestrating violence as puppets of western intelligence services.

The pattern of symbolic gestures followed by resistance to substantive reform, sometimes accompanied by protest repression, revealed a fundamental credibility gap: people can’t trust that announced reforms will be implemented when implementation depends on institutions compromised by corruption. This explains why protesters across all three countries emphasise civil society oversight and adherence to international standards as essential components of any credible reform.

From street protest to institutional reform

The emotional impact of these tragedies created rare policy windows, mobilising otherwise disengaged people and generating reform pressure. The critical question remains whether these windows will close with minimal change or whether sustained pressure will achieve meaningful institutional transformation.

These movements face significant challenges: maintaining mobilisation as emotional impact fades, avoiding co-optation or division by shallow governmental reform language and shifting from opposing clear wrongs to offering politically feasible yet transformative reform ideas. History suggests real reform is rare, bringing the danger that, without government action, momentum could be coopted by populist politicians eager to take advantage of anger at government failures and put it at the service of their regressive agendas.

But there are also grounds for optimism. The broad-based protest coalitions that have emerged have shown the potential to cross traditional political divides. Their focus on specific, documented governance failures provides tangible reform targets rather than abstract demands. The moral imperative of honouring victims creates emotional resources that could sustain them over time. And they’ve come at a time when corrupt elites’ legitimacy was already under strain due to economic challenges.

As protesters keep gathering in town squares across the Balkans, they embody a compelling vision of democracy that genuinely serves citizens rather than rulers. In reclaiming democratic promises repeatedly betrayed by those in power, they serve as a reminder that power in a democracy should flow from and benefit everyone, not just a few.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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Cover photo by Defensoría del Pueblo de Bolivia

By Samuel King and Inés M. Pousadela
BRUSSELS, Belgium / MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, May 9 2025 (IPS)

The world’s population is ageing. Global life expectancy has leapt to 73.3 years, up from under 65 in 1995. Around the world, there are now 1.1 billion people aged 60-plus, expected to rise to 1.4 billion by 2030 and 2.1 billion by 2050.

This demographic shift is a triumph, reflecting public health successes, medical advances and better nutrition. But it brings human rights challenges.

Ageism casts older people as burdens, despite the enormous social contribution many older people make through family roles, community service and volunteering. Prejudice fuels widespread human rights violations, including age discrimination, economic exclusion, denial of services, inadequate social security, neglect and violence.

The impacts are particularly brutal for those facing discrimination for other reasons. Older women, LGBTQI+ elders, disabled seniors and older people from other excluded groups suffer compounded vulnerabilities. During conflicts and climate disasters, older people face disproportionate hardships but receive disproportionately little attention or protection.

These challenges aren’t limited to wealthy countries such as Japan, where more than one in 10 people are now aged 80 and over. Global south countries are experiencing population ageing too, and often at a much faster pace than occurred historically in the global north. Many people face the daunting prospect of becoming old in societies with limited infrastructure and social protection systems to support them.

Despite these escalating challenges, no global human rights treaty specifically protects older people. The current international framework is a patchwork that looks increasingly out of step as global demographics shift.

The first significant international breakthrough came in 2015, when the Organization of American States adopted the Inter-American Convention on Protecting the Human Rights of Older Persons. This landmark treaty explicitly recognises older people as rights-bearers and establishes protections against discrimination, neglect and exploitation. It demonstrates how legal frameworks can evolve to address challenges faced by ageing populations, although implementation remains uneven across signatory countries.

Globally, the World Health Organization’s Decade of Healthy Ageing (2021-2030) represents progress in promoting age-friendly environments and responsive healthcare systems. But it’s a voluntary framework without legally enforceable protections. Only a binding treaty can deliver human rights guarantees.

That’s why the UN Human Rights Council’s decision on 3 April to establish an intergovernmental working group to draft a convention on older persons’ rights offers real hope. In the current fractured geopolitical landscape, the resolution’s adoption by consensus is encouraging.

This positive step came as a result of over a decade of dogged advocacy through the Open-ended Working Group on Ageing, established by the UN General Assembly in 2010. Through 14 sessions, states, civil society and national human rights institutions built an overwhelming case for action, culminating in an August 2024 recommendation to develop a treaty. Strategic cross-border campaigning and coalition-building by civil society organisations such as AGE Platform Europe, Amnesty International and HelpAge International were instrumental in advancing the cause.

Now the crucial phase of transforming principles into binding legal protection begins. The Human Rights Council resolution sets out the path forward. The first meeting of the drafting working group is due before the year’s end. Once drafted, the text will advance through the UN system for consideration and adoption. If adopted, this convention will follow in the footsteps of those on the rights of children in 1989 and people with disabilities in 2006, which have significantly advanced protections for their target groups.

This convention offers a rare opportunity to redefine how societies value their older members. The journey from declaration to implementation will demand persistent civil society advocacy, first to ensure the text of the convention delivers meaningful, enforceable protections rather than mere aspirational statements, and then to prevent the dilution of protections through limited implementation. But the potential reward is profound: a world where advancing age enhances rather than diminishes human dignity and rights.

Samuel King is a researcher with the Horizon Europe-funded research project ENSURED: Shaping Cooperation for a World in Transition and Inés M. Pousadela is Senior Research Specialist at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation, writer at CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Apr 28 2025 (IPS)

They found shoes, hundreds of them, scattered across the dirt floor of an extermination camp in Jalisco state. These abandoned shoes, once belonging to someone’s child, parent or spouse, stand as silent witnesses to Mexico’s deepest national trauma. Alongside charred human remains and makeshift crematoria meant to erase all evidence of humanity, they tell the story of a crisis that has reached industrial-scale proportions.

In March, volunteer search groups uncovered this sprawling death camp operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel in Teuchitlán. The discovery wasn’t made by sophisticated government intelligence operations but by mothers, sisters and wives who’ve transformed their personal grief into relentless collective action. For them, the alternative to searching is unthinkable.

Mexico is experiencing a humanitarian catastrophe of staggering proportions. Over 121,000 people have disappeared over the past decades, with 90 per cent of cases occurring since 2006, when then President Felipe Calderón militarised the fight against drug cartels. Add to this the estimated 52,000 unidentified human remains held in morgues across the country and the true scale of this national tragedy begins to unfold.

A web of complicity

What makes Mexico’s crisis particularly sinister is the systematic collusion between arms of the state and organised crime. The Jalisco camp’s proximity to federal security installations raises troubling questions about official complicity and active participation in a system that treats some populations as expendable.

The crisis follows a well-established pattern. In states such as Jalisco and Tamaulipas, criminal organisations collaborate with local authorities to enforce territorial control. They use violence to recruit forced labour, eliminate opposition and instil terror in communities that might otherwise resist. Security forces are often implicated, as seen in the 2014 disappearance of 43 students from the Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College, where investigations revealed that military personnel witnessed the attack perpetrated by a criminal organisation but failed to intervene.

Young people and women from poorer backgrounds bear the brunt of this horror. In Jalisco, a third of missing people are between 15 and 29 years old. Women and girls are systematically targeted, with disappearances often linked to human trafficking and sexual exploitation. Ciudad Juárez has become notorious for femicides, with over 2,500 women and girls disappeared and murdered since the 1990s. Migrants transiting through Mexico are vulnerable to abduction for extortion or forced recruitment, as seen in the 2010 San Fernando massacre, when 72 migrants were executed for refusing to work for a criminal group.

Mothers turned activists

Faced with government inaction or complicity, civil society has stepped in. Human rights organisations document disappearances, support victims’ families and demand accountability, including by organising public demonstrations, collaborating with international bodies and bringing cases before international courts. But the most remarkable response comes from grassroots collectives formed by families of the disappeared. Throughout Mexico, hundreds of groups such as Guerreras Buscadoras, predominantly led by women – mothers, wives and sisters of the disappeared – conduct search operations, comb remote areas for clandestine graves, perform exhumations and maintain secure databases to document findings.

Their courage comes at a terrible price. In May 2024, Teresa Magueyal was assassinated by armed men on motorcycles in Guanajuato state after spending three years searching for her son José Luis. She was the sixth mother of a disappeared person to be murdered in Guanajuato within a few months. Another mother, Norma Andrade, has survived two murder attempts. Despite knowing the risks, she and countless others continue their quest for truth and justice.

Years of pressure from civil society culminated in the 2017 General Law on Forced Disappearance, which formally recognised enforced disappearance in national legislation and established a National Search Commission. While a significant achievement, implementation has proven problematic, with inconsistent application across Mexico’s federal system, inadequate information systems, insufficient forensic capacity and minimal penalties for perpetrators.

Time for change

The discovery of the Jalisco extermination camp has generated unprecedented public outrage, sparking nationwide protests. President Claudia Sheinbaum has declared combating disappearances a national priority and announced several initiatives: strengthening the National Search Commission, reforming identity documentation, creating integrated forensic databases, implementing immediate search protocols, standardising criminal penalties, publishing transparent investigation statistics and enhancing victim support services.

For meaningful progress, Mexico must undertake comprehensive reforms that address the structural underpinnings of the crisis. Critical measures include demilitarising public security, strengthening independent prosecutors and forensic institutions, guaranteeing transparent investigations free from political interference and providing sustained support for victims’ families.

The UN Committee on Enforced Disappearances has announced the opening of an urgent procedure examining Mexico’s disappearance crisis – a step that could elevate these cases to the scrutiny of the UN General Assembly. International oversight is needed to ensure state compliance with human rights obligations.

This moment – with public outrage at its peak, presidential commitments on the table and international scrutiny intensifying – creates a potential inflection point for addressing this national trauma. If there was ever a time when conditions favoured substantive action, it’s now.

But whatever happens at the official level, one thing remains certain: Mexico’s mothers of the disappeared will continue their quest. They’ll keep searching abandoned buildings, digging in remote fields and marching in the streets carrying photos of their missing loved ones. They search not because they have hope, but because they have no choice. They search because the alternative is surrender to a system that would prefer they kept silent.

And so they continue, carrying their message to the disappeared and to a state that has failed them: ‘Until we find you, until we find the truth’.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Apr 11 2025 (IPS)

In the heart of Istanbul, a remarkable transformation is underway. What began as student protests following the politically motivated arrest of Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu has evolved into Turkey’s most significant pro-democracy mobilisation in years. The streets that once pulsed with the routine of daily life now throb with the energy of millions demanding a return to democratic governance.

The timing of İmamoğlu’s arrest – just a couple of weeks after he announced his presidential candidacy – betrayed the political calculation behind it. It was the latest effort by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to use judicial means to eliminate potential challengers. But this time, the response caught him off guard.

Generation Z is the vanguard of this movement. Young people who’ve known only Erdoğan’s increasingly authoritarian rule are now at the forefront of resistance. Their rallying cries – ‘This is just the beginning’ and ‘No salvation alone’ – signal something deeper than conventional political opposition. They seek not just a change of leadership but a fundamental reconstruction of Turkey’s democratic institutions.

The government’s response has been predictable yet revealing. Unconstitutional bans on public gatherings, facial recognition surveillance, social media throttling and mass detentions are all proof the government recognises the existential threat these protests pose. The arrest of over 2,000 protesters, including journalists, and the jailing of hundreds pending trial show the lengths to which Erdoğan will go to maintain his grip on power.

Turkey’s democratic decline under Erdoğan offers a textbook case of how democracies die. The early years of his Justice and Development Party (AKP) rule showed promise, with reforms that aligned with European Union (EU) accession requirements. But following the AKP’s third election victory in 2011, the mask began to slip.

The 2013 Gezi Park protests against urban development marked a turning point when the government’s harsh response revealed its growing intolerance of dissent. Following a failed coup attempt in 2016, Erdoğan seized the opportunity to declare a state of emergency, purging perceived opponents across state institutions. More than 150,000 civil servants, academics, judges and military personnel were suspended or dismissed, while over 50,000 people were arrested on terrorism charges with minimal evidence.

A constitutional referendum in 2017 transformed Turkey’s political system from parliamentary to presidential, granting Erdoğan unprecedented powers. The judiciary, once a check on executive power, became its servant. Independent media was systematically dismantled, with Turkey becoming one of the world’s leading jailers of journalists. Civil society organisations faced closure, takeovers, or constant harassment.

Throughout this backsliding, democratic states have largely looked the other way. Turkey’s strategic importance as a NATO member with the alliance’s second-largest armed forces, a key energy transit hub and a bridge between Europe and the Middle East has trumped concerns about its democratic erosion. The EU’s migration deal, which paid Turkey billions to stem refugee flows to Europe, epitomised the cynical bargains Erdoğan has been able to strike.

But the impressive scale and sustained nature of these protests show that Turkish people haven’t surrendered to authoritarianism.

İmamoğlu represents a formidable challenge to Erdoğan. His 2019 victory in Istanbul demonstrated his ability to build broad coalitions across a polarised electorate. That the government ordered a rerun of the election, only for İmamoğlu to win by an even bigger margin, revealed both the regime’s desperation and the limits of its electoral manipulation.

Economic challenges strengthen the opposition’s case. An inflation crisis and currency devaluation have eroded living standards. Economic discontent, combined with restrictions on basic freedoms, create a potent catalyst for change.

Yet significant obstacles remain. The opposition still struggles with internal divisions and has yet to present a coherent alternative vision. Erdoğan controls key levers of power, including the judiciary, security apparatus and much of the media. His nationalist rhetoric and framing of opposition as foreign-backed conspirators resonate with his conservative base.

For democratic states, the current moment presents a critical choice. For too long, strategic interests have trumped democratic principles in their engagement with Turkey. This calculated indifference can no longer be justified when millions of Turkish people are risking their freedom to defend the same values democratic states claim to champion.

The courage shown by Turkish people – particularly young people experiencing their political awakening – deserves recognition and support. Their struggle offers a reminder that democracy requires constant vigilance and, when necessary, extraordinary courage to defend. The question now is whether the international community will stand with them. The answer will reveal much about the state of global democracy.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org

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By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Mar 27 2025 (IPS)

This year’s session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women (CSW69), the world’s leading forum for advancing gender equality, confronted unprecedented challenges. With Saudi Arabia in the chair and anti-rights voices growing increasingly influential in the forum, the struggle to hold onto international commitments on gender equality intensified dramatically. On 8 March, International Women’s Day mobilisations also took on added urgency, with demonstrations from Istanbul to Buenos Aires focusing on resisting the multiple manifestations of gender rights regression being felt in communities worldwide.

CIVICUS’s 2025 State of Civil Society Report shows that hard-won women’s and LGBTQI+ rights are at risk, challenged by coordinated anti-rights movements that use gender as a political wedge issue. But it also provides abundant evidence that civil society is rising to the challenge.

Global regression

They call it ‘child protection’ in Russia, ‘family values’ in several Eastern European countries, ‘religious freedom’ in the USA, and ‘African traditions’ across the continent. The terminology shifts, but the objective is the same: halting progress towards gender equality and dismantling rights. Of course, it isn’t about differences in cultural values – it’s an orchestrated political strategy.

In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s system of gender apartheid has reached its brutal endpoint: women are effectively imprisoned in their homes, barred from education, work and public life, their voices literally silenced by prohibitions on singing or talking in public. Iranian authorities have gone to extreme lengths to maintain control over women’s bodies. In Iraq, lawmakers are considering lowering the minimum marriage age to just nine years old.

These extreme examples exist along a spectrum that includes Ghana’s parliament criminalising same-sex relations, Russia expanding ‘propaganda’ laws to prohibit any positive portrayal of LGBTQI+ identities, and Georgia – a country that says it wants to join the European Union – adopting Russian-style legislation restricting LGBTQI+ organisations under the cynical framing of ‘protecting minors’.

In the USA, Trump-appointed justices overturned constitutional abortion protections, triggering restrictions across numerous states. The second Trump administration has now reinstated the global gag rule, restricting international funding for organisations providing reproductive healthcare. The Guttmacher Institute projects this will deny 11.7 million women access to contraception, potentially causing 4.2 million unintended pregnancies and over 8,300 maternal deaths.

A coordinated transnational movement

Across Africa, there’s an intensifying wave of anti-LGBTQI+ legislation, often driven by political opportunism. Mali’s military junta passed a law criminalising homosexuality as part of its broader crackdown on rights. Ghana’s parliament passed a draconian ‘anti-LGBTQI+ bill’, while Uganda’s Constitutional Court upheld the country’s harsh Anti-Homosexuality Act. In Kenya, a Family Protection Bill that would outlaw LGBTQI+ advocacy remains before parliament.

As recently seen at CSW, the ongoing backlash is transnational in nature. Anti-rights forces share tactics, funding and messaging across borders, with conservative foundations from the USA promoting restrictive legislation in Africa and Russian ideologues exporting their playbook to former Soviet states and beyond. US evangelical organisations and conservative think-tanks are a particularly influential source of anti-rights narratives and funding: they’ve funnelled millions of dollars into campaigns against reproductive rights and LGBTQI+ equality worldwide, while providing intellectual frameworks and legal strategies for adaption to local contexts from Poland to Uganda.

Victories against the odds

Against this daunting backdrop, civil society continues achieving remarkable victories through strategic resistance and persistence. In 2024, Thailand became Southeast Asia’s first country to legalise same-sex marriage, while Greece broke new ground as the first majority Orthodox Christian country to do so. France enshrined abortion rights in its constitution, creating a powerful bulwark against future threats.

A regional trend continued in the Caribbean, with civil society litigation successfully overturning colonial-era laws that criminalised homosexuality in Dominica. Colombia and Sierra Leone banned child marriage, while women’s rights groups in The Gambia defeated a bill that would have decriminalised female genital mutilation.

These successes share common elements: they’re the result of sustained, multi-year advocacy campaigns combining legal challenges, community mobilisation, strategic communications and international solidarity.

Take Thailand’s marriage equality victory. Success came partly through the campaign’s intersection with the youth-led democracy movement, which connected LGBTQI+ rights to broader aspirations for a fairer society. In Kenya, despite harsh anti-LGBTQI+ rhetoric from political leaders, strategic litigation by civil society secured a court ruling preventing incitement to violence against LGBTQI+ people.

Even in the most repressive contexts, activists find ways to resist. Afghan women, denied basic rights to education and movement, have developed underground schools and created subtle forms of civil disobedience that maintain pressure without risking their lives. Along with their Iranian sisters, they continue to campaign for gender apartheid to be recognised as a crime under international law.

The path forward: intersectionality and solidarity

Progress in realising rights is neither linear nor inevitable. Each advance triggers opposition, so every victory needs defence. To solidify and last, legal changes must be accompanied by social transformation – which is why civil society complements policy advocacy with public education, community organising and cultural engagement.

Advocacy is most effective when it embraces intersectionality, recognising how gender, sexuality, class, race, disability and migration status create overlapping forms of exclusion that need integrated responses. Feminist movements are increasingly centring the experiences of Black women, Indigenous women, women with disabilities and trans women.

Even where progress can feel elusive, civil society is playing a crucial role in keeping hope alive. Organisations defending women’s and LGBTQI+ rights are maintaining spaces where people are allowed to be their true selves, providing support services that nobody else will provide, documenting violations that would otherwise go unrecorded, keeping up the pressure on the authorities and building solidarity networks that sustain activists through difficult times.

International support for these efforts has never been more important. The USAID funding freeze highlights a troubling trend of shrinking resources for gender rights defenders at precisely the moment they’re needed most. This makes diversifying funding sources an urgent priority, with feminist philanthropists, progressive foundations and governments committed to gender equality needing to step up. More innovative funding mechanisms are required to rapidly respond to emergencies while sustaining the long-term work of movement building. Individuals have power: anyone can contribute directly to frontline organisations, amplify their voices on social media, challenge regressive narratives in their communities and demand that elected representatives prioritise gender equality domestically and in foreign policy. In the global struggle for fundamental rights, no one should be a spectator. The time for solidarity is now.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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Credit: Pietro Bertora/SOS Humanity

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Mar 25 2025 (IPS)

The United Nations Refugee Agency faces devastating cuts that may eliminate 5,000 to 6,000 jobs, with potentially catastrophic consequences for millions of people fleeing war, repression, hunger and climate disasters. This 75-year-old institution, established to help Europeans displaced by the Second World War, now confronts an unprecedented financial crisis, primarily due to the US foreign aid freeze – and the timing couldn’t be worse.

As CIVICUS’s 14th annual State of Civil Society Report documents, a series of connected crisis – including conflicts, economic hardship and climate change – have created a perfect storm that threatens migrants and refugees, who face increasingly hostile policies and dangerous journeys from governments turning their backs on principles of international solidarity and human rights.

At least 8,938 people died on migration routes worldwide in 2024, making it the deadliest year on record, with many of the deaths in the Mediterranean and along routes across the Americas, including the Caribbean Sea, the Darién Gap between Colombia and Panama and the extensive border between Mexico and the USA. Just last week, six people died and another 40 are missing after their boat capsized in the Mediterranean.

Such tragedies have come time again over the last year. In March 2024, 60 people, including a Senegalese mother and her baby, died from dehydration after their dinghy was left adrift in the Mediterranean. In June, US border agents found seven dead migrants in the Arizona and New Mexico deserts. In September, seven people were found clinging to the sides of a boat that capsized off the Italian island of Lampedusa, after watching 21 other people, many of them family members, drown around them.

These tragedies weren’t accidents or policy failures. They were the predictable results of morally indefensible political choices.

The reality behind the rhetoric

The facts contradict populist narratives about migration overwhelming wealthy countries. At least 71 per cent of the world’s refugees remain in the global south, with countries such as Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia and Uganda hosting far more displaced people than most European countries. Yet global north governments keep hardening borders and outsourcing migration management to prevent arrivals. The second Trump administration has declared a ‘national emergency’ at the US southern border, enabling military deployment and promising mass deportations while explicitly framing migrants as invaders – a rhetoric that history shows can easily lead to deadly consequences.

Europe continues its own troubling trajectory. Italy is attempting to transfer asylum seekers to Albanian detention centres, while the Netherlands has proposed sending rejected asylum seekers to Uganda, blatantly disregarding the state’s human rights violations, particularly against LGBTQI+ people. The European Union is expanding controversial deals with authoritarian governments in Egypt and Tunisia, effectively paying them to prevent migrants reaching European shores.

Anti-migrant rhetoric has become a common and effective electoral strategy. Far-right parties have made significant gains in elections in many countries by campaigning against immigration. Demonising narratives played a key role in Donald Trump’s re-election. The mobilisation of xenophobic sentiment extends beyond Europe and the USA, from anti-Haitian rhetoric in the Dominican Republic to anti-Bangladeshi campaigning in India.

Civil society under siege

Civil society organisations providing humanitarian assistance are increasingly being criminalised for their work. Italy has made it illegal for search-and-rescue organisations to conduct more than one rescue per trip, imposes heavy fines for noncompliance and deliberately directs rescue vessels to distant ports. These measures have achieved their intended goal of reducing the number of active rescue ships and contributed to the over 2,400 migrant drownings recorded in the Mediterranean in 2024 alone. Tunisia’s president has labelled people advocating for African migrants’ rights as traitors and mercenaries, leading to criminal charges and imprisonment.

Despite mounting obstacles, civil society maintains its commitment to protecting the human rights of migrants and refugees. Civil society groups maintain lifesaving operations in displacement settings from the Darién Gap to Cox’s Bazar in Bangladesh. Legal aid providers navigate increasingly complex asylum systems to help people access protection. Community organisations facilitate integration through language instruction, job placements and social connections. Advocacy groups document abuses and push for accountability when state authorities violate migrants’ human rights.

But they’re now operating with drastically diminishing resources in increasingly hostile environments. Critical protection mechanisms are being dismantled at a time of unprecedented need. The implications should alarm anyone concerned with human dignity. If borders keep hardening and safe pathways disappear, more people will attempt dangerous journeys with deadly consequences. The criminalisation of solidarity risks eliminating critical lifelines for the most vulnerable, and dehumanising rhetoric is normalising discrimination and institutionalising indifference and cruelty.

A different approach is possible

Rather than reactive, fear-based policies, civil society can push for comprehensive approaches that uphold human dignity while addressing the complex drivers of migration. This means confronting the root causes of displacement through conflict prevention, climate action and sustainable development. It also means creating more legal pathways for migration, ending the criminalisation of humanitarian assistance and investing in integration support.

There’s a need to challenge the fundamental assumption that migration is an existential threat rather than a manageable reality than requires humane governance, and an asset to receiving societies. Historically, societies that have integrated newcomers have greatly benefited from their contributions – economically, culturally and socially.

In a world of unprecedented and growing global displacement, the question isn’t whether migration will continue – it will – but whether it will be managed with cruelty or compassion. As CIVICUS’s State of Civil Society Report makes clear, the treatment of migrants and refugees serves as a litmus test: the way societies respond will prove or disprove their commitment to the idea of a shared humanity – the principle that all humans deserve dignity, regardless of where they were born or the documents they carry.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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Credit: Bryan Dozier/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela and Andrew Firmin
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay / LONDON, Mar 20 2025 (IPS)

In a world of overlapping crises, from brutal conflicts and democratic regression to climate breakdown and astronomic levels of economic inequality, one vital force stands as a shield and solution: civil society. This is the sobering but ultimately hopeful message of CIVICUS’s 14th annual State of Civil Society Report, which provides a wide-ranging civil society perspective on the state of the world as it stands in early 2025.

The report paints an unflinching portrait of today’s reality: one where civilians are being slaughtered in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and elsewhere, with perpetrators increasingly confident they’ll face no consequences. A global realignment appears underway, with the Trump administration dismantling longstanding international alliances and seemingly determined to reward acts of aggression. Any semblance of a rules-based international order is crumbling as transactional diplomacy and the dangerous principle that might makes right become normalised.

Climate change continues to accelerate. 2024 was the hottest year on record, yet fossil fuel companies keep banking record profits, even as they scale back renewable energy plans in favour of further extraction. The world’s economies are reaching new levels of dysfunction, marked by soaring inequality and worsening precarity, while billionaires accumulate unprecedented wealth. Tech and media tycoons are no longer content just to influence policy; increasingly they want to control politics, raising the risk of state capture by oligarchs. Democracy is under siege, with right-wing populism, nationalism and autocratic rule surging. Democratic dissent is being crushed.

These compounding crises create a perfect storm that threatens the foundations of human rights and democratic freedoms. But in this precarious moment, precisely when civil society is needed most, it faces an accelerating funding crisis. Major donor agencies have cut back support and aligned funding with narrow national interests, while many states have passed laws to restrict international funding for civil society. The malicious and reckless USAID funding freeze has come as a particularly heavy blow, placing many civil society groups at existential risk.

At times like these it’s worth thinking about what the world would look like without civil society. Human rights violations would flourish unchecked. Democracy would erode even faster, leaving people with no meaningful agency to shape decisions affecting their lives. Climate change would accelerate past every tipping point. Women would lose bodily autonomy. LGBTQI+ people would be forced back into the closet. Excluded minorities would routinely face violence with no recourse. Whole communities would live in fear.

As events during 2024 and early 2025 have shown, even under extraordinary pressure, civil society continues to prove its immense value. In conflict zones, grassroots groups are filling critical gaps in humanitarian response, documenting violations and advocating for civilian protection. In numerous countries, civil society has successfully mobilised to prevent democratic backsliding, ensure fair elections and challenge authoritarian power grabs.

Through strategic litigation, civil society has established groundbreaking legal precedents forcing governments to take more ambitious climate action. Struggles for gender equality and LGBTQI+ rights keep being won through persistent advocacy, despite intensifying backlash. Across diverse contexts, civil society has employed a wide range of ever-evolving and creative tactics – from mass mobilisation to legal action – and proved it can and will hold the line even as civic space restrictions intensify and funding is slashed.

The message is clear: civil society represents a vital source of resistance, resilience and hope. Without it, many more people would be living much worse lives.

But if civil society is to keep doing this vital work, it may need to reinvent itself. The funding crisis demands innovation, because even before the USAID catastrophe, the donor-reliant model had reached its limits. It has long been criticised for reproducing economic and political power imbalances while constraining civil society’s ability to confront entrenched power. More diverse and sustainable resourcing models are urgently needed, from community-based funding approaches to ethical enterprise activities that generate unrestricted income.

To thrive in this changing and volatile context, civil society will have to embrace a movement mindset characterised by distributed leadership, nimble decision-making and the ability to mobilise broad constituencies rapidly. Some of the most successful civil society actions in recent years have shown these qualities, from youth-led climate movements to horizontally organised feminist campaigns that connect people across class, race and geographic barriers.

Civil society must prioritise authentic community connections, particularly with those most excluded from power. This means going beyond traditional consultations to develop genuine relationships with communities, including those outside urban centres or disadvantaged by digital divides. The strength of the relationships civil society can nurture should be one key measure of success.

Equally crucial is the development of compelling narratives, and infrastructure to help share them, that speak to people’s legitimate anxieties while offering inclusive, rights-based alternatives to the widely spread and seductive but dangerous appeals of populism and authoritarianism. These narratives must connect universal values to local contexts and concerns.

In this current cascade of global crises, civil society can no longer hope for a return to business as usual. A more movement-oriented, community-driven and financially independent civil society will be better equipped to withstand threats and more effectively realise its collective mission of building a more just, equal, democratic and sustainable world.

The 2025 State of Civil Society Report offers both a warning and a call to action for all concerned about the shape of today’s world. Civil society represents humanity’s best hope for navigating the treacherous waters ahead. In these dark times, civil society remains a beacon of light. It must continue to shine.

Inés M. Pousadela is Senior Research Specialist and Andrew Firmin is Editor-in-Chief at CIVICUS: World Alliance for Citizen Participation. They are co-directors and writers for CIVICUS Lens and co-authors of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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Credit: Juan Barreto/AFP via Getty Images

By Inés M. Pousadela
MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay, Feb 3 2025 (IPS)

Venezuela stands at a critical juncture as Nicolás Maduro begins a controversial third term as president. His 10 January inauguration, following a post-election period marked by widespread protests against election fraud and heightened repression, represents a significant setback for democratic aspirations in a country devastated by years of economic collapse and political oppression. Maduro’s confirmation at the helm is the latest chapter in a decades-long process that has transformed Venezuela from a beacon of leftist democratic aspirations into a full-blown authoritarian regime, where the last shred of legitimacy – popular election – has now vanished.

The implications of Venezuela’s crisis extend far beyond its borders, triggering the largest refugee exodus in the Americas and creating significant challenges for neighbouring countries. Almost eight million Venezuelans live abroad, with projections suggesting another two or three million might leave in the coming years.

This crisis comes at a moment when, unlike in the past, two key factors potentially leading to a democratic transition are present: unprecedented opposition unity capable of sustaining a protest movement and growing international support, with progressive Latin American governments increasingly distancing themselves from Maduro. However, Maduro’s willingness to use violent repression and his ability to maintain military loyalty suggest a difficult path ahead for democratic restoration.

Election fraud and post-election repression

The 2024 presidential election initially sparked hopes for democratic change. These hopes were crushed when Maduro declared himself the winner despite clear evidence that opposition candidate Edmundo González Urrutia had secured a significant victory.

The election campaign unfolded against a backdrop of intensifying civic space restrictions and was far from free and fair. The government disqualified popular opposition leader María Corina Machado and blocked her proposed replacement, forcing the opposition to field González Urrutia. Additional irregularities included systematic persecution of opposition leaders, abuse of public resources, media manipulation and voter suppression tactics, particularly targeting the estimated four million Venezuelan voters abroad.

Despite these challenges, the opposition demonstrated unprecedented unity and organisation. Through its Plan 600K initiative, it mobilised around 600,000 volunteers to monitor polling stations, collect the tallies produced by voting machines and independently calculate results. Their parallel count revealed that González won around 67 per cent of votes compared to Maduro’s 29 per cent, figures supported by independent exit polls. However, the National Electoral Council stopped publishing results after counting 40 per cent of votes, eventually declaring an implausible Maduro victory without providing any supporting data.

Fraud sparked widespread unrest, with 915 spontaneous protests erupting across Venezuelan cities in the two days following the election. The regime’s response was swift and severe. It labelled protests a ‘fascist outbreak’ and charged many protesters with terrorism and incitement to hatred. Security forces used deadly force, resulting in at least 25 deaths, while pro-government paramilitaries engaged in intimidation and violence.

The crackdown extended beyond protesters to target opposition and civil society leaders. Several prominent figures were forced into hiding or exile, while others faced arbitrary detention. Repression intensified in the lead-up to Maduro’s inauguration, with 75 new political detentions in the first 11 days of January alone.

Inauguration day

Maduro’s inauguration reflected both the regime’s isolation and its increasingly authoritarian character. Only two presidents – from Cuba and Nicaragua – attended the ceremony, while other governments sent lower-level representatives. The swearing-in ceremony took place 90 minutes earlier than scheduled, out of fear that the opposition’s president-elect, in exile in Spain, could somehow materialise its declared intention to enter Venezuela and hold a parallel counter-inauguration.

The government implemented extraordinary security measures to make sure this wouldn’t happen, closing land borders with Brazil and Colombia, shutting down Venezuelan airspace and deploying an unprecedented number of security forces throughout Caracas. The militarisation extended to the closure of opposition-controlled neighbourhoods and the pre-emptive detention of dozens of opposition figures.

Maduro’s inaugural address and subsequent appearances were particularly confrontational. He announced plans for constitutional changes to further consolidate power and declared the beginning of a new phase of governance based on a strong alliance between civilian authorities, military forces, the police and the intelligence apparatus. He openly discussed Venezuela’s readiness to take up arms against intervention alongside Cuba and Nicaragua, framing political opposition as a threat to national sovereignty.

International responses and regional implications

In the Americas, only Bolivia, Cuba, Honduras and Nicaragua recognise Maduro as the legitimately elected president, with only an additional handful worldwide, including China, Iran and Russia, maintaining their support.

The USA responded to Maduro’s inauguration by increasing the reward it offers for information leading to Maduro’s arrest to US$25 million, while also targeting his inner circle with new sanctions. The European Union also imposed new sanctions. The G7’s foreign ministers and the High Representative of the European Union issued a joint statement condemning Maduro’s ‘lack of democratic legitimacy’ and the ongoing repression of civil society and the political opposition.

Most significantly, the positions of Latin American states appear to be slowly shifting, with some left-wing leaders, notably those of Brazil and Colombia, not automatically siding with the Maduro regime for the first time. However, Colombia’s pragmatic approach reveals the complexities faced by Venezuela’s neighbours: while not accepting the official election results at face value, Colombia has stopped short of condemnation and has been careful to maintain its diplomatic relations, citing the need to manage border issues and the refugee situation.

Prospects for democratic change

The path to democratic transition faces significant obstacles, with military support remaining crucial to Maduro’s hold on power. The regime has secured military loyalty through a combination of institutional integration, coercion and economic privilege, with high-ranking military officers reaping generous rewards. The regime has found additional layers of protection in security structures including the National Bolivarian Guard, special police units and pro-government militias, and the Bolivarian National Intelligence Service, strongly backed by G2, Cuba’s secret service.

But the authoritarian regime has vulnerabilities. Growing international isolation, combined with continued economic deterioration, may eventually strain the system of patronage that maintains elite loyalty, including among the military. The opposition’s commitment to peaceful resistance, while seemingly ineffective in the short term, continues to earn it moral authority and international support.

While the combination of peaceful resistance, international pressure and potential internal divisions within the regime may eventually create conditions for change, the immediate future suggests a continuing struggle between an entrenched authoritarian system and a resilient democratic movement. The outcome will have profound implications for Venezuela and for all of Latin America.

Inés M. Pousadela is CIVICUS Senior Research Specialist, co-director and writer for CIVICUS Lens and co-author of the State of Civil Society Report.

For interviews or more information, please contact research@civicus.org.

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