Editorial

The curse “may you live in interesting times” (erroneously attributed to China, probably dating to nineteenth-century Britain) is scourging a great many of us these days, as a wave of authoritarianism batters the political systems and civil societies of nations once committed to democratic values and norms. The authoritarianism currently gripping portions of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas may well vary in its intensity and practices when compared to the mid-twentieth-century totalitarianism of, say, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but it shares with those regimes a fear of people's mobility and a desire to control it.