Lack Of Civil Liberties Research Articles

Social Media, Fake News, and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Sketching the Case of Southeast Asia

As a result of lockdowns across Southeast Asia, the use of all types of social media has reached high records in the whole region. Yet, the rapid social media response manifested in the form of an infodemic – an overabundance of false and misleading information. Concurrently, the region has also witnessed a significant rise in various governmental measures targeting social media actors. In the name of combating fake news, various legal enactments, including enhanced censorship and sanctions, have been pursued by Southeast Asian authorities. These, however, are often deemed unjustified and aggressively restricting of freedom of speech and expression, especially at a time when ASEAN member states have gained notoriety for their lack of civil liberties. This article aims to reveal connections between the infodemic and legal responses in Southeast Asia on the basis of a qualitative literature review and content analysis. It looks at the term infodemic along with the proliferation of different forms of fake news in the context of Southeast Asia’s social media use. It also highlights discrepancies between legal responses and the impacts of fake news during the early days of the pandemic.

Joanna Allan. Silenced Resistance: Women, Dictatorships, and Genderwashing in Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea .

Spain’s former African colonies—Equatorial Guinea and Western Sahara—share similar histories. Both are under the thumbs of heavy-handed, postcolonial regimes, and are known by human rights organizations as being among the worst places in the world with regard to oppression and lack of civil liberties. Yet the resistance movement in one is dominated by women, the other by men. In this innovative work, Joanna Allan demonstrates why we should foreground gender as key for understanding both authoritarian power projection and resistance. She brings an ethnographic component to a subject that has often been looked at through the lens of literary studies to examine how concerns for equality and women’s rights can be co-opted for authoritarian projects. She reveals how Moroccan and Equatoguinean regimes, in partnership with Western states and corporations, conjure a mirage of promoting equality while simultaneously undermining women’s rights in a bid to cash in on oil, minerals, and other natural resources. This genderwashing, along with historical local, indigenous, and colonially imposed gender norms mixed with Western misconceptions about African and Arab gender roles, plays an integral role in determining the shape and composition of public resistance to authoritarian regimes.

Counterpublics in Saudi Shopping Centres, Beach Resorts, and Gated Communities

In recent decades, Saudi Arabia, much like other places around the world, has witnessed a trend towards the privatization and securitization of urban space. In this paper I argue that although indisputably exclusive, gated communities and other types of privatized public spaces in Saudi Arabia enable practices which, outside the walls of such developments, are strictly banned. In a country known for its strict moral standards and lack of civil liberties, these architectures permit the formation of “counterpublics.” Offering alternative perspectives on gender relationships, modesty, and nudity, such “counterpublics” challenge prevailing notions of what public and private mean.

Isle of Misfit Ploys: The Cuban Embargo

The U.S.’s stance towards Cuba has historically used rhetoric about the lack of civil liberties, dictatorship, and security to defend the embargo put in place during the 1960s. Politicians of the era viewed communism in Cuba as an immediate threat that had to be snuffed out before it could infect the entire hemisphere. Their hope was that by isolating the island, Cuba’s citizens would be compelled to fight for reform and institute their own democracy. That approach, however, has backfired entirely. Neither government is innocent — Cuba’s human rights record remains as poor as ever and the U.S. has almost singlehandedly destroyed the country’s economy and health system. Though guilt is shared, the U.S. alone controls the relationship’s future. Reforms are in their infancy, but in light of the turbulent past, there has been progress.

Brunei in 2009: Maturity in Doubt?

"Maturity as a Nation" was the theme for Negara Brunei Darussalam's 25th National Day celebrations in February 2009. Although the oil-rich nation has made several impressive strides, the authoritarian sultanate also faces unemployment, low foreign investment, and a lack of civil liberties.

Singularidad y regularidad de las transiciones a la democracia en Europa del Este

This article assesses the uniqueness of the transitions to democracy which occurred in Eastern European countries after 1989, a feature which has led to great difficulty in applying models developed for the analysis of other transitions such as those of Latin America or Southern Europe. The starting point of the process (monopoly of power in the hands of the Communist parties, a state-controlled economy, lack of civil liberties) and the rapid change of system have not been convincingly explained by the standard transition theory, which therefore requires a reformulation. Likewise, recourse to comparisons (namely with the Spanish case) has proved excessive, as it has often resulted in equating these transitions to other hardly comparable ones.