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	Civic freedoms are the backbone of good governance and inclusive democracy by CIVICUS, Carnegie Endowment, agencies   Dec. 2025   People Power Under Attack 2025 (CIVICUS)   The world has witnessed a dramatic rollback in fundamental freedoms, including speech, peaceful assembly and association, over the past five years, according to the latest ratings report from the CIVICUS Monitor.   The report, People Power Under Attack 2025, finds that people in 83 countries and territories now live with their freedoms routinely denied, compared to 67 in 2020, with stark declines both in states considered democracies and those governed by authoritarian regimes. The proportion of people living in countries with ‘Open’ or ‘Narrowed’ civic space, fell from nearly 13% in 2020 to just over 7% today.   “We see a continued trend of attacks on people’s right to speak up, come together as a collective, and protest for their rights around the world. This year’s slide is led by states often seen as models of democracy such as the USA, France, and Italy. In a context of rising authoritarianism and populism, no country seems immune from this deeply worrying trend,” said CIVICUS Secretary General Mandeep Tiwana.   “Civic freedoms are the backbone of good governance and inclusive democracy, but fewer and fewer governments are willing to respect the agency of their people to freely and meaningfully participate in public life.”   This year alone, 15 countries saw their ratings downgraded. Among the most concerning changes is the decline in the United States, which moved to the third tier rating ‘Obstructed’ following sweeping executive orders, militarised responses to protests and mounting attacks on press freedom.   European Union Member States, France, Germany and Italy were also all downgraded to ‘Obstructed’, reflecting a hardening stance on dissent, including the adoption of restrictive laws and practices to limit pro-Palestinian and environmental protests. Israel’s civic space fell even further to ‘Repressed’ as authorities eroded judicial independence, assaulted protesters, targeted and deported Palestinian citizens of Israel, and banned the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees from operating in Israel, all amid the genocide in Gaza. Civic space in the Occupied Palestinian Territories is already rated ‘Closed’ following years of Israeli control.   In the Americas, El Salvador moved to ‘Repressed’ as President Bukele consolidated power, introduced a foreign agents law targeting the media and civil society, and further dismantled institutional checks and balances.   In Africa, Sudan now joins the list of worst offenders in the ‘Closed’ category where civic space is practically non-existent, following more than two years of devastating civil war that has allowed the parties to the conflict to crush the space for civil society and media across the country. Burundi also fell to ‘Closed,’ while Madagascar dropped to ‘Repressed’ following deadly crackdowns on sustained youth-led protests, eventually leading to the military takeover in October 2025.   “While each downgrade reflects the sum of particular incidents in a country or territory, together they show clearly that across the world, civic space is under sustained attack by governments and anti-rights actors,” said CIVICUS Monitor Head Ine Van Severen.   The report documents the most common violations of civic freedoms in 2025. Detention of protesters is the top violation, documented in at least 76 countries, with half of those documented in Africa South of the Sahara. Journalists are frequently detained under restrictive laws, including cybercrimes laws and in some countries vague security or anti-terrorism laws, while judicial harassment of activists is also widely documented.   “The detention of protesters and activists has become the preferred method of governments to silence those who dissent or publicly disagree with the authorities,” said Ine Van Severen. “Authorities must stop detaining people and breaking up protests, and instead start listening to and engaging with people’s demands.”   Despite these troubling trends, the report highlights some positive developments. Chile advanced protections for environmental defenders through landmark legislation, while Senegal and Gabon improved their ratings following political transitions and legal reforms.   Meanwhile, in Bangladesh, an interim government released protesters and activists from prison, many of whom were persecuted under the regime of former Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. These examples show that progress is possible when governments engage constructively with civil society and uphold international human rights standards.   “We are witnessing a global emergency for civic freedoms. Even with some encouraging steps in places like Chile, Senegal, and Gabon, these remain exceptions to a deeply troubling global trend. Governments must act decisively: dismantle restrictive policies, end arbitrary detentions, and guarantee the right to protest. Failure to do so will risk eroding the legitimacy that underpins their authority,” said Tiwana.   * The CIVICUS Monitor is a global research platform that assesses the state of civic freedoms—including freedom of expression, association, and peaceful assembly—across 198 countries and territories. Each country is assigned a score from 0 to 100, reflecting the openness of its civic space, with higher scores indicating greater respect for civic freedoms. Based on these scores, countries are classified into five categories: Open, Narrowed, Obstructed, Repressed, or Closed.   http://monitor.civicus.org/globalfindings_2025 http://publications.civicus.org/publications/2025-state-of-civil-society-report/ http://lens.civicus.org/sudan-in-crisis-mass-killings-continue-while-the-world-looks-away/ http://srdefenders.org/joint-statement-time-to-release-all-human-rights-defenders-and-end-their-prolonged-detention/ http://www.ohchr.org/en/topic/civic-space-and-human-rights-defenders   Dec. 2025   Global Protest Tracker: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace   Anti-government protests flooded streets across the globe in 2025, from Sub-Saharan Africa to Eastern Europe to Southeast Asia. New demonstrations emerged in more than seventy countries.   Of those catalogued in Carnegie’s Global Protest Tracker, twenty-seven occurred in countries ranked “partly free” with respect to people’s access to political rights and civil liberties, twenty-six “free,” and seventeen “not free.”   Anger against government corruption fueled a sizeable portion of the protests catalogued in the Global Protest Tracker this year. The two other main triggers were antidemocratic overreach and economic hardship.   Specific corruption scandals or allegations sparked demonstrations in multiple regions. In March, North Macedonia erupted in protests condemning the alleged corruption and bribery that led to a deadly nightclub fire. Over 45,000 people in Spain took to the streets to criticize Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez for the various political and corruption scandals surrounding his administration. The persistent issue of corruption in the Gambia brought out protesters who demanded government accountability.   The Gen-Z protests in Nepal, which garnered significant media attention, were also spurred by issues of nepotism and corruption, and eventually led to Prime Minister K. P. Sharma Oli’s resignation. Around the same time, the Philippines saw Gen-Z protests against a corruption scandal involving the country’s flood control projects.   Other corruption-related protests were triggered less by specific scandals or allegations and more by simmering underlying public anger over corruption and other forms of government malfeasance.   Mongolia’s protests in May initially emerged to condemn the lavish spending of the son of Prime Minister Luvsannamsrain Oyun-Erdene, but they developed into a broader anti-corruption movement that ousted Oyun-Erdene. In Indonesia, Gen-Z protests against parliament members’ high salaries were partially driven by longstanding anger toward perceived government corruption.   Morocco’s Gen-Z protests were similarly fueled by anger over corruption, though they initially stemmed from Moroccans’ frustration over inappropriate government spending and the neglect of government services.   In Mexico, the death of Uruapan Mayor Carlos Alberto Manzo triggered nationwide demonstrations against corruption and violent crime. The ongoing protests in Serbia, which began in November 2024 over the Novi Sad train station roof collapse, evolved into anti-corruption protests and general protests against the government of President Aleksandar Vucic.   Antidemocratic overreach by governments, a major theme of protests in 2024, continued driving demonstrations this year. Anger over broad governmental claims to expanding power triggered many protests. In Indonesia, students and pro-democracy activists protested revisions to the nation’s military law, which permitted military officers to serve in civilian government posts and thus widened the military’s role in civilian affairs.   Central African Republic President Faustin-Archange Touadéra’s bid for a third term in upcoming elections mobilized thousands who opposed his extended rule.   Mali experienced protests after the military junta extended its rule for another five years and dissolved all political parties. The removal of presidential term limits in Togo triggered deadly protests, led by Gen-Z and other activists angered by Faure Gnassingbe’s extended rule and concerned over the state of democracy in the country.   In Ukraine, thousands took to the streets over a law that they feared would undermine the independence of anti-corruption agencies by placing them under the supervision of the presidentially appointed prosecutor general.   Brazil’s “shielding” bill, which provided greater immunity to lawmakers, also prompted enraged citizens to demonstrate against its passage. The United States experienced multiple protests throughout the year against the authoritarian actions of President Donald Trump and his administration.   Governmental targeting of political opposition or civil society also pushed citizens to the streets in various places. Anger over attacks on internal dissenters or opposition figures triggered protests in Israel over the dismissal of Shin Bet chief Ronen Bar, in Ivory Coast over the ban of opposition candidates in the 2025 presidential election, and in Turkiye over the arrests of various opposition figures (which have been ongoing since 2024).   Threats to civil rights and liberties prompted numerous demonstrations, such as those in Slovakia criticizing an NGO bill that held similarities to Russia’s foreign agent law, in the United Kingdom decrying a Supreme Court ruling against transgender rights, and in Hungary denouncing the ban against Pride demonstrations and criticizing a foreign funding bill that also resembled Russia’s foreign agent law.   Economic hardship also drove many demonstrations in 2025. Several countries experienced protests over unpopular austerity measures, including Belgium, Indonesia, France, Slovakia, Romania, and Argentina.   Frustrated by the ongoing economic struggles in their countries, demonstrators argued that the various reforms—which impacted pensions, education, and worker benefits—would only worsen the existing hardships. Demonstrators in other countries protested generally against high costs of living and Government imposed austerity measures often directed by international financial institutions and actors.   In Greece and Chile, workers demanded greater protections and living wages in the midst of cost of living pressures from their government. In Angola and Ecuador, increased fuel prices drove hundreds to thousands of protestors to the streets. Spain’s high rent prices, exacerbated by the region’s tourism boom, triggered large protests from residents who demanded government action in increasing affordable housing.   Some protests that began in 2024 sustained their momentum throughout 2025. The anti-corruption protests in Serbia and the election- and EU accession-related protests in Georgia have occurred almost daily since their emergence last year. Other protests, such as those in Turkiye against the arrest of opposition figures, in France and Belgium involving farmers and the EU-Mercosur trade agreement, and in Israel against ultra-Orthodox conscription, continued intermittently throughout 2025 in response to major government actions. Protests against the Israeli government regarding the war in Gaza also continued to erupt every month across the globe, from Italy and Morocco to Malaysia and Australia.   Some observers have seized on the surge of youth-led protests in countries such as Indonesia, Nepal, the Philippines, Peru, Timor-Leste, Madagascar, Morocco, and Mexico during the latter months of 2025 to put forward the idea of a rising global “Gen-Z movement.” Although this cluster of youth-led protest movements is significant, it is not a new trend.   Young people led numerous protests throughout the year, including in Serbia, Mongolia, and Togo, and more than twenty significant anti-government protests in 2024. Looking back even further, data from the Global Protest Tracker reveals that the rates of youth-led protests between 2017 to 2019 were similar or higher to the rate of youth-led protests in 2025. As such, while it is noteworthy that the 2025 Gen-Z protests have drawn inspiration from one another and united under common symbols it remains uncertain whether they will combine to constitute a substantially interconnected wave of protests.   http://carnegieendowment.org/emissary/2025/12/global-protests-2025-genz-corruption-economy   Oct. 2025   Attacks on global aid, rising securitisation, and the dismantling of the international aid architecture pose an urgent threat to fundamental freedoms, a UN expert warned today.   “The collapse of global aid greatly endangers the survival of civil society organisations and threatens the entire civil society ecosystem, as well as the future of international solidarity, collective action, and participation in multilateral forums,” said Gina Romero, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights to freedom of peaceful assembly and of association in her report to the 80th session of the UN General Assembly.   Romero noted that, since the beginning of 2025, thousands of civil society associations that have been filling critical gaps by providing life-saving services, supporting victims of human rights violations, delivering vital humanitarian responses, and working to fight corruption, protect the environment, and advance peacebuilding, are either disappearing or severely reducing their operations. The impact has been especially severe for grassroots organisations and those led by women, LGBTQI groups, and marginalised communities.   “What is unfolding is not merely a funding issue, it is a structural crisis in the international solidarity ecosystem,” the Special Rapporteur said. “Civic space globally is suffocating, not only because States are intensifying the scale and gravity of repression, but also because the lifelines that kept it alive are fundamentally challenged.”   The expert stressed that securitisation of the global agenda is driving a shift in funds and political priorities towards strengthening defence and military capabilities at the expense of democratisation and human rights. She noted that States are increasingly misusing national security grounds and discourse to justify the repression civil society and social movements.   “The securitisation and militarisation of State responses to non-violent collective actions, which are increasingly led by youth activists and have resulted in serious violations, are deeply alarming,” Romero said.   The Special Rapporteur called for urgent action to rebuild international solidarity and redesign a strengthened, fairer global aid architecture. “This requires reimagining international aid architecture, through a participatory and transparent process, and ensuring that it is equitable, inclusive, people-centred and rights-based,” she said.   The expert warned that severe restrictions on fundamental freedoms threaten decades of progress on human rights and democratisation, jeopardising the fulfilment of global commitments towards the Sustainable Development Goals, peace and security, inclusion and equality, and climate justice.   “States should implement a human rights-based approach to security, ensuring security policies and decisions are firmly rooted in international human rights standards; enable freedoms; and foster democratic resilience and inclusive governance,” Romero said.   http://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/10/global-aid-dismantling-poses-existential-threat-collective-action-and-human http://www.ohchr.org/en/documents/thematic-reports/a80219-report-special-rapporteur-rights-freedom-peaceful-assembly-and http://eurochild.org/news/podcast-shrinking-funds-for-nonprofits/
	Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves by Rafal Rohozinski SecDev Flashnotes Canada   Nov. 2025   The headlines focused on what they always focus on: the rhetoric about immigrants, the dismissiveness toward European allies, the muscular nationalism that plays well in certain domestic constituencies. But while pundits dissected the predictable provocations of the Trump Administration’s new National Security Strategy, the document’s most consequential passages slipped past largely unnoticed. The real revolution is buried in the fine print. It concerns not borders or battalions, but bytes and bandwidth.   What the NSS articulates, with remarkable candour for a strategic document, is a fundamental reimagining of the global order. Not the reimagining that critics expected, a retreat from international engagement, but something far more ambitious: the explicit subordination of allied sovereignty to American digital dominance.   The document announces what might be called a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, positioning the Western Hemisphere as a zone of exclusive American economic and strategic influence. The United States will, it declares, “deny non-Hemispheric competitors the ability to position forces or other threatening capabilities, or to own or control strategically vital assets, in our Hemisphere.”   Read that carefully. “Strategically vital assets” in 2025 no longer means military bases or shipping lanes. It means cloud infrastructure, AI platforms, and the digital arteries through which modern economies flow. The language is aimed primarily at China, but its logic applies universally, extending to any power, including European allies, that might challenge American technological preeminence in Washington’s backyard.   “The terms of our agreements, especially with those countries that depend on us most and therefore over which we have the most leverage, must be sole-source contracts for our companies.”   That sentence, buried in the strategy’s economic provisions, deserves to be read and reread. It is perhaps the most honest articulation of American strategic thinking in decades. Countries within the American sphere (and Canada sits at the very centre of that sphere) are expected not merely to cooperate with American firms but to preference them exclusively. The document pairs this expectation with an instruction to “make every effort to push out foreign companies that build infrastructure in the region,” extending explicitly to “cyber communications networks” and technology infrastructure.   Here is where the document’s internal contradictions become not merely philosophical but practically consequential. The NSS premises its entire strategic logic on the primacy of national sovereignty. Nations, it insists, must “put their interests first and guard their sovereignty.”   This is the animating principle behind every critique of multilateral institutions, every withdrawal from international agreements, every insistence that America will no longer subordinate its interests to global consensus.   Yet the same document that celebrates sovereignty as the foundational principle of international order proceeds to systematically circumscribe the sovereignty of America’s closest allies. The Hemisphere is defined as an American zone of prerogative. Technology procurement is expected to favour American vendors.   Partnership benefits become “contingent on winding down adversarial outside influence,” language elastic enough to encompass European technology partnerships, Asian supply chains, or any collaboration that might dilute American market dominance.   This is not hypocrisy in the conventional sense. It is something more coherent and more troubling: a worldview in which sovereignty exists in concentric circles, with American sovereignty absolute and allied sovereignty conditional.   The United States reserves for itself the right to determine which external influences are “adversarial” and which partnerships are permissible. Sovereignty, in this framework, is not a universal principle but a privilege that flows downward from Washington.   For countries like Canada, the implications are stark. Between 64 and 70 percent of Canadian internet traffic already routes through American territory. All thirteen trans-Pacific fibre-optic cables land on the American west coast; none terminate in Canada. Over 61 percent of Canadian businesses store critical data on American cloud services.   The digital economy that increasingly defines Canadian prosperity runs on infrastructure neither owned nor controlled domestically. The NSS transforms this dependency from an inconvenience into a lever, a mechanism of influence more effective than any tariff.   But the Canadian case merely illustrates a global dynamic. We are entering a zero-sum world where allies and partners are transient and transactional, where relationships are measured not in shared values but in commercial advantage.   The concentration of power within the emerging global digital economy, particularly its commanding heights in AI and cloud infrastructure, means that technological dependency translates directly into political subordination. Control the platforms on which modern economies run, and you control the economies themselves.   This is, in many ways, more consequential than the NSS’s more inflammatory provisions. The disparagement of immigrants will generate outrage and resistance. European leaders will bristle at their diminished status and find ways to push back. These are visible conflicts that will play out in diplomatic exchanges and newspaper editorials.   But the quiet restructuring of digital dependency, the transformation of technological dominance into instruments of statecraft, operates below the threshold of public attention. It reshapes the architecture of power while everyone argues about the furniture.   The question this strategy forces upon America’s allies is not whether to resist American influence (that ship has largely sailed) but whether to accept a future in which sovereignty becomes a formality, a flag to be waved while decisions of consequence are made elsewhere. For countries that have built their prosperity on American-controlled digital infrastructure, the choice may already be constrained.   For those with time and foresight to act, the NSS should serve as a clarifying document: a roadmap of the future Washington envisions, and a warning about the costs of dependency in an age when data is power and platforms are territory. It is always important to read the fine print. In this case, the fine print is not merely important. It is the strategy itself. Everything else is theatre.   * Rafal Rohozinski is the CEO of the Secdev Group, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI), and co-chair of the Canadian AI Sovereignty and Innovation Cluster.
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