Life on a warming planet. Canada is now battling multiple wildfires across the provinces of British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba—with one fire covering some 13,000 acres and forcing the evacuation of thousands of people near Fort Nelson, B.C. Smoke from the fires has meanwhile triggered air-quality alerts in five U.S. states—Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Montana—as officials there asked residents to limit their time outdoors. Wildfires like these have been fueled by an ongoing, extreme drought over the past few years. And just this week, the journal Nature published a study that finds the summer of 2023 to have been the Northern Hemisphere’s hottest in about 2,000 years.

Last September, Rachel Cleetus explored the heat waves, wildfires, and other extreme weather events of the passing summer—parsing out their relationship to human-caused climate change and assessing the state of play in efforts to mitigate it. “Some sectors are harder to decarbonize than others,” Cleetus says. “In transportation, global demand for electric vehicles has been accelerating for individual people and families, and for mass transit, but air travel and maritime transportation are much harder to move. The production of iron, steel, and cement is also hard to decarbonize.” As she explains, despite the growing adoption of renewable-energy technologies, humanity has already locked in significant climate impacts, such as rising sea levels and disappearing ice sheets—and could yet cause irreversible changes to other natural systems.

A destra. Journalists at Rai, Italy’s public broadcaster, went on strike this week over the “suffocating control” they say the country’s populist-right government is now exercising over the network.

Recently, the network had canceled a scheduled monologue by the author Antonio Scurati, just a few hours before he was to go on the air for the national holiday commemorating Italy’s liberation from Benito Mussolini’s National Fascist Party during World War II.

According to the Rai journalists’ union, managers and on-air talent at the network had meanwhile been pushed out of jobs for criticism of the Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), the party leading the country’s ruling coalition and a political descendant of Mussolini’s Fascists.

Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s prime minister and Fratelli d’Italia’s leader, responded by publishing the monologue on her Facebook page—defying the accusation that her government was censoring Scurati and dismissing the opposition as “crying at the regime.”

In July 2022, two months before Meloni won Italy’s general elections, Dario Cristiani explored what a Fratelli d’Itali government would mean—for the country and for Europe. While Meloni’s party would be unlikely to have much of an impact on the policies of the European Union, Cristiani says, it would be a matter of time before her ideas of “order and tradition” took shape in Italian public life.

Police and thieves. Some home news: The Long Game, The Signal’s first-ever print extra is now available—a limited-run magazine, exploring the new frontiers of the global conflict between authoritarian states and democratic life.

Created in partnership with the Human Rights Foundation for the Oslo Freedom Forum, the edition features a series of conversations—with the American social scientist Francis Fukuyama, the Bosnian investigative journalist Miranda Patrucić, and others—on questions from how autocrats are adapting artificial intelligence to how corruption inside dictatorships is spreading beyond them, to what the issues of democracy and human rights might end up meaning for your investment strategy.

The Long Game is a first for us—a print edition, a beautiful object, a new exploration of design to realize an idea. It’s also a sign of things to come for a brand we’ve always intended to expand into new mediums. You can read the story behind it in our editor’s note here.

—Hywel Mills

The Oslo connection. Despite all the partisan malice that might seem to be consuming the democratic world, there’s a widespread, enduring consensus on the indispensability of democracy itself—and the ideas of human freedom it’s built on. That consensus may be fractured, but it’s deep and still resilient.

You can see it in the global response to the invasion of Ukraine, broadly understood as an attack by a powerful autocracy not on an emerging democracy only but on democracy as such.

You can see it in the global response to other assaults on human freedom when they break into the news—whether it’s Tehran’s crackdown on Iranian women protesting after the death of Mahsa Amini at the hands of the regime’s morality police; Moscow’s cynical, ultimately fatal imprisonment of Alexei Navalny; or Beijing’s Wild West–style cash bounties on dissidents from Hong Kong.

The Signal isn’t just part of this consensus; we’re actively committed to it. It’s central to our mission and underlies some of the most vital questions we explore. Which is why we’re delighted to partner with the Human Rights Foundation on this, the first Signal extra.

In 2009, HRF inaugurated the Oslo Freedom Forum to pay tribute to survivors of Nazism and Soviet communism. They’ve since developed it into an annual event that gives an international platform to democratic dissidents from around the world; cultivates an international network that supports them throughout the year; and in all of it, raises international awareness of what’s at stake in the global clash between dictatorship and democratic life.

And what’s at stake isn’t always so easy to see from the vantage ground of the West. What would the casual shopping choices of European consumers have to do with almost unimaginable political repression in a place like China’s Uyghur region?

Why would such phenomenally generous sums of money be coursing into prestigious American institutions from the autocracies of the Persian Gulf? Or how would ethically minded investments made with the best of intentions end up supporting authoritarian economies?

Once in a while, the news might include the innocuous-looking citizen of a democratic country arrested and jailed in an autocratic one, only for us to wonder, what did she do to find herself in that kind of trouble? It can be hard to recognize a pawn when we don’t see the board.

To get at these stakes in a new way, we met with activists and analysts from HRF’s network, all speakers at the 15th anniversary of the Oslo Freedom Forum last June. Six of our conversations are collected here.

—John Jamesen Gould

Generals and rebels. April 15 marked the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of civil war in Sudan—between the military and the Rapid Support Forces, a paramilitary group that once worked with it. Now, Sudan is enduring an acute humanitarian crisis, with children dying of hunger in displaced-persons camps as the RSF appears close to taking control of Western Sudan’s Darfur region.

In October 2021, the military seized power from a civil-military council that had ruled Sudan since 2019, when the longtime dictator Omar al-Bashir was overthrown. A month after the coup, James A. Robinson examined the obstacles to a successful transition from autocracy to democracy in the country.

As Robinson explains, Sudan’s military had long controlled much of its economy, as armed forces in many developing countries do—making the leadership uninterested in economic reform. Which, it turns out, is a problem for everyone. Across dozens of countries that have tried to pull of political transitions in recent decades, Robinson says, a common cause for failure has been an inability of the coalitions that depose autocrats to build political and economic institutions that can include and attract their countries’ vested interests—not least the military.

Year of the ballot. As of April 19, the world’s biggest election is underway as voters in India start going to the polls. It’s an election that, over the next six weeks, about 970 million people—more than 12 percent of the world’s population—are eligible to vote in.

The contest is meanwhile just one of some 80 local and national elections scheduled for this year. Altogether, more than half the global population will able to vote in them. And both represent record numbers in human history.

In January, Steven Levitsky examined what the context of these elections show about the state of democracy worldwide. Most strikingly, to Levitsky: Despite the global rise of a populist right with autocratic tendencies, economic modernization has helped cultivate strong civil societies in recent decades—which have helped see to it, in turn, that very few democratic countries have become stable autocracies.

It might not always be apparent in the news, but for all the challenges it’s facing, democracy is proving remarkably resilient.

Build your dreams. On April 15, Tesla informed employees that it would be firing 10 percent of its workforce, or some 14,000 people. The cuts have come in the same month the carmaker reported an 8.5-percent decline in sales in the first quarter of 2024 from the same period last year—the company’s first drop in quarterly sales since the beginning of the pandemic, in 2020.

In February, Alice Han explored how the Chinese auto manufacturer BYD had managed to surpass Tesla as the world’s best-selling electric-vehicle brand in the last three months of 2023. In Han’s view, BYD has a number of advantages over Tesla: generous government subsidies; cheaper labor and battery costs; and an enormous Chinese market, often favoring domestic products. And yet, Han says, the company’s future—along with the EV market’s globally—is uncertain, on account of a wave of protectionist measures around the world, as well as rising competition from legacy automakers.

‘A whole new era.’ After a video was posted in early April of female students in Iran dancing and riding a motorcycle to celebrate their college graduation, their university has said it would pursue legal action against the women. Iranian human-rights lawyers have defended the graduates’ celebration as completely legal, while the university’s threats have prompted new calls within Iran to support women and students facing repression by the Islamic Republic.

The public behavior of young women in Iran has been a matter of unrelenting national controversy since the 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in police custody in September 2022, after being arrested and beaten for not wearing her hijab in accordance with the country’s laws. Her death triggered weeks of demonstrations throughout Iran, along with effusive global condemnation. In the month following Amini’s death, in October 2022, Vali Nasr examined the threat the uprising posed to the regime. The scale of the protests, Nasr says, revealed the breadth of popular discontent with the country’s leaders—and with some of the cultural foundations of the Islamic Republic itself.

Same as the old boss. Surprisingly, Turkey’s political opposition defeated the party of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in nearly all the country’s major cities in local elections on March 31. Erdoğan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) won 35.5 percent of the vote nationwide—its worst performance in 20 years—while the Republican Party won 37.8 percent and now controls Turkey’s five largest cities. Turkish voters appeared to be punishing Erdoğan’s party for the country’s economic troubles after the official inflation rate hit nearly 70 percent in February.

In December 2021, Steven Levitsky explored the weakening position of authoritarian populists worldwide—including Erdoğan and Brazil’s then-president Jair Bolsonaro, who went on to lose his bid for reelection in 2022. To Levitsky, economic mismanagement and poor handling of the pandemic had been eroding the standing of many populist authoritarians. Meanwhile, as he sees it, “thermostatic” political change—citizens wanting to toss rulers out after too many years in office—is always inevitable. But as popular frustration with establishment elites remains strong globally, there’s still nothing to diminish the allure among politicians around the world of tapping populist anger to gain or hold power.