“Dictators learn faster than internet users.” This is the sad view of the future of the internet. But is this actually true? For many years, China has been the prototype for countries trying to...

At one point it looked like a number of totalitarian states and systems would succeed in closing the door that the internet had opened for freedom of speech. This was met by a new wave of “hacktivism”...

In Cuba it is forbidden for citizens to have their own internet connection. If you want to read your e-mail or surf the net, you are directed to use public internet connections in internet cafés...

On 4 February 2014, Facebook celebrated its 10th anniversary. The social networking giant now has over 1.23 billion users, but there are still political leaders around the world who don't want their...

Social media played a central role in the popular uprising in Egypt. But the new rulers, regardless whether they belonged to the Muslim Brotherhood or the military have done their very best to take...

Maung Zarni is a Burmese scholar in exile. He is an expert on the political affairs of Myanmar, and currently Visiting Fellow at London School of Economics. In this article he writes about the...

PEN was once a kind of social club for authors. The task is currently to found a PEN centre in Myanmar that can map the country's literature and its degree of freedom of expression, which plays a...

One of the problems shaking the state of Myanmar can be found in the ethnic conflicts that have arisen in the wake of the faltering dictatorship. While the majority of the population speaks Burmese...

How does a country's literature recover after years of mass censorship? James Byrne, poet and founder of the poetry journal The Wolf, has followed the developments in Burma for many years and he was...

Following the student protests in Burma in 1988, an independent magazine called The Irrawaddy was founded in exile in Thailand, and quickly became a respected source for news from the closed country...