It’s increasingly hard to ignore the fact that democracy around the world is in retreat.

On the one hand, many of the world’s most powerful states — from China to Saudi Arabia — are governed by authoritarian administrations that seem only to be growing in strength. On the other hand, the respect for liberal democratic norms — like the right to protest and the independence of the judiciary — is on the decline in established governments. And many states that seemed to be on the road to democracy — like Hungary and Turkey — are stuck in a kind of “illiberal democratic” purgatory.

In total, around 72 percent of the world’s population lives under some form of authoritarian rule, according to some experts. Researchers at Freedom House claim that around 38 percent of the world’s population live in countries that can be characterized as “not free.” Liberal academic Larry Diamond has termed the retreat of democracy around the world a “democratic recession.”