Photo from CIVICUS

The world’s civic space is in its worst state since the nonprofit CIVICUS started its global coverage in 2018. Some 118 countries now have serious civic space restrictions and only 2.1% of people live in countries with open civic space.

Two more countries – Bangladesh and Venezuela – were downgraded to the worst civic space category this past December. Intimidation, protest disruption and detentions of protesters were the top violations documented in 2023, with democracy, climate and environmental activists and women and LGBTQI+ people often are targeted. Despite the many constraints, civil society is doing everything it can to keep going, according to data from CIVICUS in its State of the Civil Society Report 2024.

One in six people are currently exposed to conflict. Conflict-related deaths are at their highest in decades, with civilian casualties up 62% in 2023. Global military spending rose a record US $2.2 trillion. 

Violence threatens to escalate further across the Middle East, and the region is far from the only one submerged in conflict, according to the report’s authors. Russia continues to wage war on Ukraine now with the help of North Korea, civilians suffer as military fights militia in Sudan and a bloody conflict has set in three years on from a military coup in Myanmar. 

More than 114 million people are now displaced, according to data from CIVICUS. Long-established tenets of international human rights and humanitarian laws are being flouted.

As 2023 began, 72% of people lived in authoritarian regimes, and the situation didn’t improve as the year went on. A record number of countries are sliding towards authoritarianism, according to the authors, while the number of countries democratising is the lowest in decades, the data shows. 

The proportion of people living in countries with closed civic space, 30.6%, is the highest in years. In countries that have recently undergone military coups, army rule has consolidated. Gabon and Niger had military coups in 2023, completing a “coup belt” that stretches coast-to-coast across Africa, according to the report’s authors.

The full 140-page report can be found here … https://bit.ly/40CfAYF

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Source From Non Profit Times