[Thanks to Zain Sayed Alam.]

Colin Marshall in Open Culture:

One often hears lamented the lack of well-spoken public intellectuals in America today. Very often, the lamenters look back to James Baldwin, who in the 1950s and 1960s wrote such powerful race-, class-, and sex-examining books as Go Tell It on the Mountain, Giovanni’s Room, and The Fire Next Time, as one of the greatest figures in the field. Though Baldwin expatriated himself to France for much of his life, he seems never to have let the state of his homeland drift far from his mind, and his opinions on it continued to put a charge into the grand American debate.

Upon one return from Paris in 1957, Baldwin found himself wrapped up in the controversy around the Civil Rights Act and the related movements across the south. He wrote several high-profile essays on the subject, even ending up himself the subject of a 1963 Time magazine cover story on his views. That same year, he went on a lecture tour on race in America which put him in close contact with a variety of student movements and other protests, whose efficacy he and Malcolm X debated inthe broadcast above.

More here.

Over at Resurgent Dictatorship:

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. The BRICS Bank. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization. What do these organizations have in common? For starters, China is a major player in each of them. And in their own way, each of them indicate how China—and other authoritarian governments, including Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela—have tired of playing by the rules of existing international institutions.

A recent panel discussion organized by the International Forum for Democratic Studies with a group of leading experts assessed how authoritarian regimes are creating new illiberal norms and institutions as part of their efforts to reshape global governance toward their own preferences. The speakers described how illiberal regimes in Eurasia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Latin America are attempting to reforge global institutional frameworks by prioritizing state sovereignty, security, and mutual non-interference over democratic accountability, government transparency, and respect for human rights.

Alexander Cooley—who analyzes the emergence of authoritarian counternorms in his July 2015 Journal of Democracy article (further discussed here on the blog)—warned that autocrats have become surprisingly adept at neutralizing and subverting the institutions that have traditionally upheld democratic norms. By introducing antidemocratic norms into regional rules-based bodies, creating alternative institutions, and cracking down on NGOs, Cooley argued that authoritarian regimes are challenging scholarly assumptions that regional integration would contribute to the proliferation of democratic norms. Instead, illiberal regimes have discovered that these tactics can be used with particular effect at the regional level as a buffer against international criticism and to silence local voices who once played a key role in bringing human rights violations to the attention of regional organizations.

More here.