Insight from the frontlines

Today, as the dust of those momentous days settles, Kenyans are asking: was it worth it? What did we gain, and how have we sustained those gains in the face of continued repression?

A poor education system, a society that does not know or value its history, that is excessively obsessed with capitalist growth and development, a society that allows hate and bigotry to fester unchallenged, is a society that can be made to give up its rights and its freedoms.

The food sent from Manila to Jakarta was a small thing. It was also honest. Someone saw people in the street and decided to feed them. That impulse, to act across distance on behalf of people you may never meet because their situation and yours are connected, is where regional solidarity actually lives, in choices made in ordinary moments when no one is watching. But impulse alone does not build movements that last. Impulse is where it starts. Structure is what carries it forward.

For more than a decade, Türkiye has been widely described by political scientists as a “competitive authoritarian” regime: a system where elections still matter, opposition parties still compete, and democratic institutions formally continue to exist, but where the ruling bloc systematically tilts the political playing field through control over the judiciary, media, state resources, and coercive institutions. Yet what has unfolded in Türkiye since the 2023 general elections increasingly suggests that the country is moving beyond competitive authoritarianism toward a more consolidated and openly managed form of authoritarian rule, one in which elections may continue to exist formally, but where the possibility of genuine power alternation is being structurally narrowed.