Asia & the Pacific

On April 6, 2022,  the Belfer Center's Future of Diplomacy Project and Indo-Pacific Security Project as well as the Center for Public Leadership hosted a hybrid seminar with Ambassador Shivshankar Menon, former National Security Advisor of India and former Foreign Secretary in India’s Ministry of External Affairs, and Ambassador Richard Verma, former U.S. Ambassador to India and Belfer Center Senior Fellow, on India’s foreign policy and U.S.-India relations in a changing world order. The discussion explored why India abstained from recent U.N. votes deploring Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, what that means for U.S.-India relations, both bilateral and through the Quad, and how the war in Ukraine will affect geopolitics in Eurasia and the Indo-Pacific. Gopal Nadadur, MPA/ID candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School moderated this conversation.

Authoritarian modes of governing have steadily increased over the past 10 years. A number of autocracies have intensified their repressive tactics, while several democracies – many of which were once classified as consolidated – have tampered with fundamental rights and the rule of law. Despite a few developments to the contrary, the Bertelsmann Transformation Index (BTI) 2020 highlights the ongoing decline of democracy around the globe.

The presentation of BTI results focused on the resembling patterns of dismantling democracy in (highly) defective democracies such as Hungary, Moldova, the Philippines, Serbia or Zambia and regimes in which this process has been so pronounced that they are now categorized as autocracies in the BTI, such as Bangladesh, Guatemala, Honduras, Kenya, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Turkey or Uganda. It looked at the typical sequence to an authoritarian deconstruction of democratic institutions from within, from the purposeful undermining of oversight institutions, attacking the media and civil society to manipulating the electoral system, in order to examine the resonance of these trends in the United States. The goal of the discussion is to identify the features and underlying causes of this erosion, and to suggest promising counter-strategies.

The panel considers how the US, UK and EU can contribute to a global response. It also asks what a global response to the health and economic crisis in the developing world would look like.