Thailand: The War on Democracy
4 December 2013 Thailand: The War on Democracy By Gwynne Dyer It has gone quiet in Bangkok, as the people who have been trying to overthrow the government tidy up the debris that litters the city after...
View Article2013 Year-Ender
26 December 2013 2013 Year-Ender By Gwynne Dyer It’s always dangerous to declare “mission accomplished.” Former US president George W. Bush did it weeks after he invaded Iraq, and it will be quoted in...
View ArticleBrazil Impeachment
Q: What’s the difference between the coup that overthrew the elected government in Thailand in Thailand in 2014 and the coup that has now removed the elected government in Brazil? A: The coup-makers in...
View ArticleWhat’s Wrong with Southeast Asia?
Thirty years ago most of Southeast Asia was run by thuggish dictatorships. Then the Philippines showed the rest of the world how to get rid of the dictators without violence, and its non-violent...
View ArticleTwo Bombs
There were two bombs on Monday. The one in Britain killed at least 22 people and injured 120 as they came out of a concert at Manchester Arena. It was carried out by a suicide bomber named Salman Abedi...
View ArticleSouth-East Asian Fall?
A quarter-century before the Arab Spring of 2011, there was a democratic spring in South-East Asia: the Philippines in 1986, Burma in 1988, Thailand in 1992 and Indonesia in 1998. The Arab Spring was...
View ArticleWhich Non-Violent Revolutions Will Succeed?
20 September 2020 The old calculation was simple and brutal: if you want to overthrow a tyrant, you must use violence. There was an occasional exception, like Gandhi’s use of non-violent protest to...
View ArticleArab Winter
16 December 2020 Ten years ago this week Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor in Tunisia, set himself alight in front of a government building in rage at the corrupt dictatorship that had ruined his young...
View ArticleFalling Birth Rates
18 May 2021 The birth rates are falling fast in all the world’s more prosperous countries, but the generation now in their middle years have not yet grasped what that means for their later years. If...
View ArticleBurma Resistance: Wrong Way
20 June 21 Burma (Myanmar) is a land of poets. Eleven published poets won seats in the 2015 election, which gave the country a limited form of democracy after decades of military rule. In the popular...
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