Democracy

The 2025 Gen Z protests in Madagascar were catalysed by several key political events. Madagascar’s position as a Small Island Developing State, uniquely vulnerable to climate change and economic precarity, poses specific challenges, and the country’s government has failed to address these in a manner that protects the futures of its young people. The 2025 protests rallied against political corruption and government inadequacy, demanding a stronger and more just political system as well as greater accountability for systemic shortcomings. While President Rajoelina was ousted, more work is needed to ensure stronger foundations for the nation’s development and future.

The death of 13-year-old Ochanya Ogbanje in 2018 sparked Nigeria’s #JusticeForOchanya movement seeking greater protections for women and girls against sexual and gender-based violence and greater accountability for perpetrators. The movement resurfaced in 2025 following concerted efforts at mobilisation, with renewed demands for justice and concrete procedural improvements. Interviews with movement organisers from different generations draw lessons on how such movements can be managed to ensure the attention and support needed to lead to long-term, structural change.

Malaysia and Singapore share a history of suppression of youth activism by the state, and as a result, this has led to the depoliticisation of young people, who are often labelled as apathetic. However, the changing realities of both countries, ­such as the instability of the economy, has led young people to engage more in political discussions in recent years. However, the rise of youth activism also entails rising harassment and state suppression of youth activists through surveillance, arrests and threats to future employability. 

This edition of Perspectives seeks to explore how actors in the state, political parties, and civil society have been able to make those in government less certain about the future balance of power through and outside of the ballot box.

After a four-year absence, the Active Youth (Aktív Fiatalok) Research Group has returned with a new survey about the political attitudes of higher education students in Hungary. The significance of this year’s findings relies on the fact that the political views of the majority of students sampled in this most recent survey – including some born as recently as 2000 – were formed during consecutive terms of prime minister Viktor Orbán and his government, considered by many political scientists and commentators to be a hybrid regime.

The Guanabara Bay is one of Rio de Janeiros postcard symbols and venue for the regattas of the Olympic Games 2016. This book by journalist Emanuel Alencar shows that the Olympic Games passed without fulfilling one of its important promises: the clean-up of the bay.

Without civic engagement and participation, democratization cannot succeed. This publication sheds light on the complex mechanisms of shrinking spaces in the Western Balkans, provides analyses, and develops adequate countermeasures.

Political socialization has been an absolute failure in the new Hungarian democracy. Facts and figures from "Political Capital - Policy Research & Consulting Institute" in co-operation with Heinrich Böll Stiftung.

All over the world, information technologies and the internet have taken an increasingly important role in communication, challenging the conventional means of news consumption. Our office in Thailand has performed interviews with academics, journalists and activists to explore the role of new media in social movements in Thailand, and how it will develop.

Publication Series on Democarcy 14: After 1989 in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and the Caucasus, two aspects played and still play a key role in determining whether a political system exhibits merely a democratic façade or a truly democratic constitution: civil society and political culture, on the one hand, and the influence of ethnic conflicts, on the other. This publication illuminates the successes and failures, the instruments and institutions, and the concepts behind two decades of external democracy promotion.