Democracy Lab Weekly Brief, September 19, 2016

To keep up with Democracy Lab in real time, follow us on Twitter and Facebook. 

Christian Caryl mourns a noble democratic experiment in Syria that has just been crushed by Assad.

Christian Davies and Paul Hansbury see signs that Belarus is coming in from the cold.

Dalibor Rohac calls for a renewed effort to finally do something about the rise of populism.

Nathaniel Heller critiques Senator Ben Cardin’s ambitious, if flawed, proposal for how the United States can tackle corruption overseas.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

Thomas Carothers, Mark Freeman, Cale Salih, and Robert Templer have published a guide for the Carnegie Endowment to help recipients of Western development assistance understand who their donors are and what they really want.

Also for Carnegie, Marc Lynch sums up the latest research about how authoritarian Arab regimes learned suppressive tactics from each other in the wake of the Arab Spring. Lynch also takes a critical look at Tunisia’s transitional justice process.

In the New Yorker, Joshua Yaffa profiles two journalists-turned-politicians who are trying to dismantle Ukraine’s corrupt political system.

For BloombergView, Tyler Cowen explains how the nature of globalization has changed.

For the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Richard Gowan, Lawrence Woocher, and Daniel Solomon call for the United Nations’ next secretary-general to make preventing mass atrocities a priority.

The Economist excoriates Egypt’s authoritarian government for its failure to deal with the country’s rising social and economic pressures.

A gay Ugandan man publishes an open letter in NewsDeeply asking to be resettled to a safe country. Also in NewsDeeply, Flora Bagenal highlights some key findings from a major new survey about the prevalence of female genital mutilation.

The New York Times’ Deborah Sontag uncovers how the United States coopted Colombia’s attempt to hold its drug warlords responsible for their crimes.

In the photo, Egyptian photographer Mahmoud Abdel Shakour gestures from inside a soundproof glass dock during his trial on August 9.

Photo credit: KHALED DESOUKI/AFP/Getty Images