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Yordanos Eyoel

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    Leadership

    It’s time to build a global pro-democracy movement

    Yordanos Eyoel
    Hahrie Han
    May 11, 2022
    It’s time to build a global pro-democracy movement

    Rawpixel/Getty Images

    Eyoel is the founder of Keseb and a visiting fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University. Han is the inaugural director of the institute and a professor of political science at Johns Hopkins.

    Democracy does not disappear by accident. Instead, all over the world, we are witnessing deliberate attempts by antidemocratic actors to weaken civil society, cripple the rule of law and activate social fragmentation. From weaponizing fear to re-writing history to exploiting religion, today’s autocrats and their supporters leverage the same playbook. At the heart of that playbook is a multipronged attack on civil society. In 2021, among the 33 autocratizing countries, repression of civil society worsened in 22.

    If a diminished civil society is the foundation of autocracy, a robust and inclusive civil society is the bedrock of democracy. Civil society serves as an intermediary between the state and the individual, composed of organizations such as schools and universities, nonprofit and advocacy groups, professional associations, churches, and cultural institutions. Civil society is the connective tissue that holds any society together. It is no accident that anti-democratic actors start there.

    Despite the centrality of civil society to the authoritarian playbook, efforts to strengthen democracy too often underinvest in civil society — even though it is our best line of defense.

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