All posts by Joshua Kurlantzick

Joshua Kurlantzick is senior fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). He is the author, most recently, of "A Great Place to Have a War: America in Laos and the Birth of a Military CIA". Kurlantzick was previously a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, where he studied Southeast Asian politics and economics and China's relations with Southeast Asia, including Chinese investment, aid, and diplomacy. Previously, he was a fellow at the University of Southern California Center on Public Diplomacy and a fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy. He is currently focused on China’s relations with Southeast Asia, and China’s approach to soft and sharp power, including state-backed media and information efforts and other components of soft and sharp power. He is also working on issues related to the rise of global populism, populism in Asia, and the impact of COVID-19 on illiberal populism and political freedom overall.

All Posts
FeaturedOpinion

As in Myanmar, Coups are Becoming More Successful, and More Sophisticated

Military dictatorships are not as common as they were during the Cold War. Today, leaders trying to roll back democracy usually do so in creeping ways, by altering legal systems, voting rules and other institutions to give themselves greater power. And yet coups have not only lingered; they’ve become more effective in the past decade.

/ March 6, 2021
FeaturedNEWSOpinion

Myanmar’s Election: NLD Seems to Win Sizable Victory

If the NLD does win by an even larger margin than in 2015, and the military-aligned Union Solidarity and Development Party (USDP) does worse—the NLD would potentially have the opportunity to follow through on promised reforms that would reduce the power of the armed forces, the dominant institution in Myanmar.

/ November 10, 2020