State weakness and failure along with civil wars will remain relatively common given the many factors that bring about intrastate conflict and violence. Somalia remains a failed state thirty years after it collapsed, while over the past decade Syria, Yemen, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo have all

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Populism offers strongmen an ideological basis for making themselves dictators while pretending to be democrats. It is particularly useful when strongmen seek to neutralize or appropriate the self-correcting mechanisms of democracy. Since judges, journalists, and professors allegedly pursue political interests rather than truth, the people’s champi

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