Understanding politics across borders and divides
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Nearly every constitution in the Middle East guarantees freedom of expression, and nearly every criminal code takes most of it back. Reporters Without Borders classified 18 of the 19 countries in its Middle East and North Africa region as “difficult” or “very serious” in the 2026 World Press Freedom Index, … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Free speech in Africa is contested less through formal censorship of newspapers than through three newer instruments: cybercrime statutes, regulator suspensions, and switching off the internet. Reporters Without Borders rates press freedom as “difficult” in 24 of sub-Saharan Africa’s 48 countries and “very serious” in five, with Eritrea last in … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Almost every constitution in Asia guarantees freedom of expression. Almost none of them is the document that decides what can actually be published. The gap between the guarantee and the practice is wider here than in any other populated region, and the mechanism closing it is increasingly legislation rather than … Read more
Last Updated: July 2026 Overview Free expression is protected on paper almost everywhere in the Americas and contested in practice almost everywhere. The region has one of the world’s strongest treaty guarantees, Article 13 of the American Convention on Human Rights, which flatly prohibits prior censorship. It also has the sharpest recent regional decline outside … Read more
Overview Every country protects speech and every country limits it. The global debate is not whether to draw a line between protected expression and prohibited harm, but where to draw it, and no two legal systems answer that the same way. What one country treats as protected political speech, another prosecutes as hate speech, blasphemy, … Read more