Democracy Lab Weekly Brief, July 5, 2016

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Elliott Prasse-Freeman finds that Burma’s new democratically elected government is not hurrying to undo the repressive mechanisms of the old regime.

Jennifer Guay shows that statelessness is not just a political problem, but has serious economic implications.

Tyler McBrien spotlights censorship and pro-government bias at South Africa’s powerful public broadcaster as local elections approach.

And now for this week’s recommended reads:

Democracy Lab contributor Daniel Lansberg-Rodriguez explains in the New York Times how Venezuela’s regime is using political prisoners as bargaining chips.

For RFE/RL, Daniella Cheslow takes stock of the precarious situation in Tunisia five years after its “Jasmine Revolution.”

In the Guardian, Vidhi Doshi portrays the contradictions of life in Gurgaon, a new Indian city built almost entirely by private companies.

In Foreign Affairs, Kathleen McNamara posits that the Brexit fiasco has revealed a divide between those who see globalization as a force for good and those who have been left behind by the new world order. (Also worth reading on this topic: Rouss Douthat questions the self-described cosmopolitanism of the global elite in the New York Times; in the Washington Post, Daniel Drezner suggests that other divides — such as those between older and younger voters — may be no less relevant.)

In a brief for Freedom House, Bulcsu Hunyadi and Csaba Molnar find that anti-immigrant sentiment is becoming a mainstream issue in Central Europe — in contrast to countries farther West, where it remains marginal.

For the Carnegie Endowment, Christopher Cox explains how the disunity of Egypt’s remaining opposition political parties makes political change unlikely.

Human Rights Watch calls on Burma’s new government to “dismantle the infrastructure of repression.” The Guardian’s Oliver Holmes reports that a Burmese human rights group has been pressured to cancel the launch of a report critical of the army.

In Latin America Goes Global, Sofia Rivas and Amy Williams detail the drama behind the scenes when the Organization of American States failed to reach a conclusion about the state of democracy in Venezuela.

In the photo, members of the far-right movement Generation Identitaire protest against migrants in Paris on May 28.

Photo credit: MATTHIEU ALEXANDRE/AFP/Getty Images