Democracy Lab Weekly Brief, April 4, 2016

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Juan Nagel shows how Venezuela’s recurring power outages are directly linked with the policies of its embattled government.

Karina Piser lays out how Tunisia’s largest Islamist party helped drive the country’s democratic transition forward.

Emin Huseynov explains why Azerbaijani dictator Ilham Aliyev doesn’t deserve acceptance on the world stage. (Even so, Aliyev still managed to get his photo op with President Obama during a visit to Washington last week.)

Lily Hyde reports on detainees from the Ukrainian conflict who were left in limbo after prisoner exchanges ground to a halt following the Minsk II ceasefire agreement.

Hanna Hindstrom warns that Burma’s military is using cyberterror against dissidents.

And Maiko Ichihara explains why East Asia’s democracies have been reluctant to engage with a democratizing Burma.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

Hundreds of journalists around the world are reporting on a massive leak of documents from a Panamanian law firm that reveals secretive offshore dealings by heads of state, oligarchs, criminals, athletes, and movie stars.

Süddeutsche Zeitung explains how the leak happened, and the Guardian offers a guide to the findings — including revelations about scandalous links to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The Associated Press reports on documents that implicate Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko.

David Kaplan and Drew Sullivan of the Global Investigative Journalism Network call for more support for investigative journalism by Western donors.

For CSIS’s “cogitAsia” blog, Aung Din, a former Burmese student leader and political prisoner, describes his joy at seeing a new, democratically elected government come to power in Burma.

Bloomberg’s Jordan Robertson, Michael Riley, and Andrew Willis profile Andrés Sepúlveda, a Colombian hacker who has confessed to rigging elections across Latin America for years.

The Carnegie Moscow Center’s Oleksandr Holubov assesses Ukrainian President Poroshenko’s trip to Washington, and explains why it was so disappointing.

For the New York Times, Vanessa Barbara describes Brazil’s growing political polarization.

In the Washington Post’s “Monkey Cage” blog, Loubna El Amine argues that demands for democracy and human rights are universal responses to repressive state authority, not a sign of Western cultural imperialism.

In the Huffington Post, Maciej Bartkowski helps us think through what makes a popular uprising against a democratically elected government legitimate (and what does not).

And finally, if you happen to be in Boston this week, check out a presentation at the Harvard Kennedy School on Thursday about building support for taxation in developing countries.

In the photo, supporters of President Dilma Rousseff rally in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, on March 31, 2016.

Photo credit: MARIO TAMA/Getty Images