The Columbia Political Review’s
High School Essay Contest
It is CPR’s mission to cultivate the next generation of politically engaged writers. To that end, we began our annual high school essay contest in 2017, aiming to amplify the voices of talented high school students from all across the country and the world. In the wake of a global pandemic, war, and deep uncertainty, we hope that the Columbia Political Review can serve as a platform for bold and creative solutions to the world’s most pressing issues.
On Columbia’s campus and across the world, the year 2025 has been defined by the upheavals of norms that have governed the modern global system for almost a century, most urgently in our institutions’ commitment to democratic processes, freedom of speech, and civil liberties at large. This year, students were asked to confront the widespread perception that “liberal democracy is everywhere in retreat in the face of authoritarians feeding on discontent over economic woes, rapid social change, mass migration, disinformation and general malaise.” Their task was to:
“Choose one country and make an argument regarding the factors that contribute to the current status of its democratic institutions or the country’s political outlook as it relates to democratic freedoms.”
Our Editorial Board was deeply impressed by the number of submissions we received—over 100, hailing from 18 countries—as well as the sheer quality of each essay’s writing and argumentation. Among many other subjects, students discussed the backslide of Tunisian democracy after its revolution in 2011; the persistence of misinformation as a cudgel against civil liberties throughout American history; and the various ways that technology has impacted democratic processes and values across the world.
Submissions were judged for their clarity, concision, cohesion, strength of argument, use of evidence, and consistency in style and tone.
CPR is proud to announce Anuvaa Shah of Montgomery High School as the champion of the 2025 High School Essay Contest. Ms. Shah will receive a $300 award for her submission.
We are also proud to announce two runners-up and one honorable mention. Congratulations to runners-up Tanvi Kubal of Park Tudor School in Indianapolis, Indiana and Abhinav Anne of Neuqua Valley High School in Naperville, Illinois!
Congratulations also to our honorable mentions this year: Sunmin Na of BC Collegiate Upper School in Seoul, South Korea and Yaxin Zhang of Arlington High School in Arlington, Texas.
Ms. Kubal and Mr. Anne will each receive a $100 award for their excellent submissions.
You may read the essays from our champion and runners up below. The winning essay will also be published as a featured article on our website. Essays have been lightly edited for style and clarity.
We hope you enjoy reading these submissions as much as the Editorial Board did. CPR continues to encourage high school students of all backgrounds to engage in political scholarship and argumentation of every kind. At a time when the world’s commitment to incisive discourse is under scrutiny and, in many places, under attack, youth’s continued engagement with fact-based politics is more important than ever. Congratulations to these five students, and we look forward to opening the 2026 High School Essay Contest in June.
First Place Essay: Code, Conflict, and Citizenship: Estonia’s Digital Democracy at a Crossroads
By: Anuvaa Shah
In an era where democracies around the world struggle to keep pace with digital disruption, one tiny Baltic nation has dared to transform citizenship itself into a virtual enterprise. In Estonia, 99% of government services are available online, and nearly half of the Estonians cast their ballots electronically. Yet, in a globalized world where misinformation is rampant and geopolitical hostility is on the rise, this “e-democracy” model is facing unprecedented challenges. Estonia’s rise as a digital pioneer has been accompanied by constant threats from Russia and the increasing global rise of digital authoritarianism. The very openness that drives its civic innovations risks becoming an Achilles’ heel. Estonia’s “e-democracy” is often hailed as a model of civic disengagement, but its future hinges on whether it can reconcile open access with national security in the face of growing cyberwarfare and algorithmic manipulation.
Having achieved independence in 1991 with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Estonia made a remarkable pivot toward Western alliances, becoming a member of NATO and the EU in 2004. Its democratic structures rest on a parliamentary system renowned for transparency and accountability, ranking among the freest in the former Soviet sphere of influence. This embrace of liberal democracy was driven by necessity: a small nation with limited resources needed efficient, cost-effective governance. Technology promised precisely that.
Determined to fuse democratic values with digital innovation, Estonia built what many consider the world’s first true “e-government,” resting on a platform known as X-Road, a secure data-exchange layer that allows various databases to communicate seamlessly. The country’s electronic identity system provides every citizen with a digital identity that grants access to a wide range of services, from medical prescriptions to digital tax returns. Most notably, Estonia launched national online voting (i-Voting) in 2005, becoming the first country in the world to achieve this spectacle. In combination with blockchain security protocols, this infrastructure has contributed to an exceptionally high level of trust among the public, with nearly universal digital literacy among its citizens.
Yet the same characteristics that make Estonia a global inspiration have also turned it into a target. Estonia was hit in 2007 by one of the world’s first massive cyberattacks, widely attributed to Russian-backed groups, which paralyzed banks, government networks, and the media for weeks. Since then, Russian misinformation efforts have increasingly targeted Estonia’s Russian-speaking minority, attempting to plant suspicion in digital systems and to undermine electoral legitimacy. These threats expose a fundamental predicament: openness is the lifeblood of democratic digital infrastructure, but openness is also a vulnerability. The nation depends on NATO’s Cooperative Cyber Defence Center of Excellence, CCDCOE, based in Tallinn, as a partial defense against these ongoing attacks. Yet reliance on NATO raises its own democratic dilemma: outsourcing digital defense to a military alliance may safeguard critical infrastructure, but it also risks normalizing a securitized mindset that could blur the lines between civic freedoms and military oversight. In this way, Estonia’s partnership with NATO highlights a deeper tension: the struggle to defend digital democracy without militarizing it.
This tension, between radical transparency and the surveillance measures necessary for national security, articulates broader philosophical debates regarding democracy itself. Hannah Arendt’s distinction between the public and private spheres provides a helpful framework: she argued that democracy depends on preserving a public arena for debate while protecting private life from excessive intrusion (Arendt, The Human Condition). Estonia’s e-democracy risks erasing this distinction. Consider, for instance, the e-ID program, which creates metadata on citizens’ behavior and participation patterns. In its efforts to prevent cyber infiltration, Estonia must ask itself: when does protecting public trust start to infringe upon private liberties? This is where Estonia’s struggle resonates far beyond its borders, offering a cautionary tale for all democracies seeking to digitize civic life.
Theorists describe Estonia’s dilemma as a struggle between techno-democracy, a society in which governments are enhanced by technology that empowers civic voice and accountability, and digital sovereignty, which emphasizes strict control over national cyberspace, even at the expense of certain freedoms. Estonia is uniquely balanced on this fault line. Its open architecture is an expression of techno-democracy, yet its geopolitical circumstances require it to uphold a strong sovereignty framework that may conflict with civic transparency. The ongoing Russian information war explains just how precarious this balancing act has become.
Furthermore, Estonia’s experience contains essential lessons for societies experimenting with algorithmic governance, including the United States. Silicon Valley’s libertarian ethos celebrates digital transparency, but has also unleashed surveillance capitalism and algorithmic polarization on a massive scale (Zuboff, The Age of Surveilling Capitalism). Estonia, by contrast, is contemplating AI-enabled judicial processes, such as automating small-claims court rulings, which brings forth pressing concerns of accountability, fairness, and the protection of due process. These debates are not just idle arguments. They foreshadow the impending trials every advanced democracy will be required to confront as artificial intelligence, big data, and networked information transform governance itself.
In this sense, Estonia isn’t just a tiny Baltic republic with an advanced IT ministry. It’s a living laboratory for the future of democracy, revealing both the potential and perils of digitized civic life. Its success will depend on preserving the delicate line between public and private protection, between technological accessibility and defensive security. Estonia’s model suggests that the future of democracy may hinge not just on ballots, but on firewalls, code ethics, and the unseen mechanisms that shape civic life. Estonia’s fragile experiment proves that in the twenty-first century, the survival of democracy may rest not in grand buildings or paper ballots, but in our willingness to defend human liberty within the lines of codes that now govern our collective future.
Runner-Up Essay: The Quiet Coup: How Georgia’s 2024 Election Unraveled a Democracy
By Tanvi Kubal
Picture this: A government claims a tidy win—54% of the vote—even as exit polls tell a different story, one where they’re more than ten points behind. The opposition shouts fraud, observers sit uneasily in their seats, and crowds spill into the streets in protest. But the ruling party doesn’t blink.
They hold up the numbers, polished and official, and ask with quiet confidence: Who are you going to believe, us or your lying eyes?
In any normal country, what happened in Georgia’s October 2024 election would be called a coup. Ballot boxes stuffed in broad daylight. Exit polls are dismissed like yesterday’s news. International observers documenting systematic fraud… yet the world shrugged. Perhaps because this is how democracies phase out now: not with tanks in the streets, but with lawyers in courtrooms, bureaucrats stamping papers, and opposition leaders politely conceding to obviously fraudulent results.
The fraud wasn’t subtle. It was brazen. Methodical. Captured on camera for posterity. Georgian monitoring coalition My Vote logged more than 900 reports of voting irregularities at over a third of polling stations—so blatantly patterned that it became a dark joke among statisticians. “Russian tail” patterns: telltale spikes in vote distribution that scream fraud to election experts worldwide. Approximately 400 polling stations showed highly suspicious results, the kind of numbers that make statisticians laugh and poll watchers weep. Electronic voting machines malfunctioned repeatedly. Georgian Dream activists collected identity cards like trading cards, casting ballots for unknowing voters.
The European Parliament rejected the results by a 444–72 vote, declaring the elections failed to represent the will of the Georgian people. When even the cautious EU calls your election a sham, you’ve achieved democratic failure.
At the center sits Bidzina Ivanishvili, a billionaire oligarch whose fortune reached $6.2 billion in 2023—an enormous concentration of wealth that enabled the systematic purchase of an entire nation. It isn't influence; it’s ownership. The United States sanctioned Ivanishvili on December 27, 2024, with the State Department citing his role in sabotaging Georgia’s democratic and Euro-Atlantic future for Russia’s benefit. Ivanishvili’s control operates through what experts call a vertical decision-making structure parallel to official state institutions. His former bodyguard runs the Interior Ministry. His hand-picked loyalists control the judiciary so completely that the system has been systematically captured, while dissenting voices face career destruction.
Enter the “foreign agents” law—a legislative weapon of mass destruction disguised as transparency. Passed in May 2024 despite massive popular resistance, the law requires organizations receiving 20% or more of foreign funding to register as “organizations serving the interests of a foreign power.” The public saw through this charade immediately. On a soaked street in downtown Tbilisi, tens of thousands crouched behind makeshift shields of Georgian and European Union flags wrapped around their shoulders like armor. In front of them, a parliament once born from revolution, now passing laws that echo Kremlin tactics, even as it drapes itself in European rhetoric.
The government's response revealed its true nature. Hundreds were detained during the December 2024 protests, with numerous systematic human rights violations reported against detainees. Police vans became mobile detention centers. Protesters emerged with injuries—fractured bones, concussions.
While GD crushed civil society at home, Russia waged warfare from abroad. Russian influence operations deployed disinformation campaigns targeting Georgia during the 2024 election period. But these weren’t your grandfather’s WWII propaganda posters. Deepfakes. Staged videos featuring paid actors. Fake whistleblower narratives. The operation was so sophisticated that the FBI issued warnings about Russian-linked disinformation videos, as Russian operatives used AI to manufacture evidence targeting electoral integrity.
The economic warfare runs deeper. Trade with Russia has increased significantly since 2021, while thousands of Russian companies have registered in Georgia since the Ukraine war began—potentially facilitating sanctions evasion, even as Georgian boys die defending the democracy of a country that isn’t their own.
The regime's mask slipped entirely when Prime Minister Kobakhidze announced the suspension of EU accession talks until 2028—directly violating Article 78 of Georgia’s Constitution, which mandates “full integration into the European Union.” When your government’s policies violate your own constitution, you’re witnessing a coup in slow motion. Each violated clause is another thread in democracy’s shroud.
Enter President Salome Zourabichvili: Antigone in a modern tragedy, defying tyranny with constitutional law as her only shield. She refused to recognize the October election results and maintained her legitimacy beyond her term's official end, declaring her intention to strip the disputed government of legitimacy.
The international response has been swift and unprecedented. The European Parliament’s February 2025 resolution passed overwhelmingly,refusing to recognize Georgian Dream’s “self-proclaimed authorities” while affirming Zourabichvili as the legitimate president. The EU suspended visa-free travel for Georgian diplomatic passport holders and froze significant direct assistance. Multiple European countries have imposed sanctions on Georgian officials.
But the real blow came from Washington. The United States went straight for the puppet master. Sanctioning Ivanishvili represents recognition that this isn’t just corruption; it’s a systematic assault on democracy itself.
Georgia’s nightmare should terrify anyone who believes in democratic governance. is is not just about one small country in the Caucasus. It’s a preview of democracy’s death by a thousand cuts. But Georgia reveals exactly how this retreat unfolds—not through dramatic military coups, but through the patient corruption of democratic institutions from within.
Economic anxiety becomes the gateway for disinformation. Disinformation breeds social division. Division enables elite capture. Elite capture transforms democracy into authoritarianism while keeping the electoral theater running. An hour of democratic destruction—each stage devouring the next in endless, self-consuming cycles.
The most chilling aspect? Polls show around 80% of Georgians support EU membership. Even as their democracy dies, Georgians cling to the European dream. eirtragedy reveals a brutal truth: wanting democracy isn’t enough to preserve it when facing adversaries who understand exactly how to kill it while making it look like suicide.
In the 21st century, authoritarian victory requires neither conquering armies nor dramatic coups. It requires only patience, precision, and a population too economically vulnerable to resist the slow strangulation of their own freedoms. Georgian Dream has discovered how to kill democracy while maintaining its pulse—a technique that, if successful, will be studied and replicated by aspiring authoritarians worldwide.
The question isn’t whether this could happen elsewhere.
It’s whether we'll recognize the symptoms before it’s too late.
Runner-Up Essay: Budapest is Burning
By Abhinav Anne
The most dangerous thing about Hungary today isn’t that it abandoned democracy—it’s that it still claims to be one. The ballots are printed. The polls open. People vote. But behind this ritual of democracy lies a machinery that no longer serves the people. It serves power.
Once hailed as a post-Soviet success story, Hungary has since transformed into a cautionary tale. For years, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has dismantled liberal democracy, not through military force or constitutional collapse, but through the steady erosion of independent institutions, a relentless flood of nationalist propaganda, and the manipulation of public trust. The illusion remains intact. But the substance is gone.
Orbán didn’t seize power overnight. He was elected. And re-elected. That’s what makes Hungary’s story so unsettling. After returning to office in 2010 with a supermajority, he rewrote the constitution. He redrew voting districts to benefit his party, Fidesz, and passed electoral reforms that increased their hold on parliament. Since Viktor Orbán’s return to power, Hungary has undergone significant democratic backsliding. The country’s Freedom House rating dropped from “Free” in 2010 to “Partly Free” by 2023, a clear erosion of political rights and civil liberties under his government’s rule.
What followed was a slow, calculated takeover of everything meant to keep power in check. The judiciary was packed with loyalists. The country’s largest media companies were folded into pro-government conglomerates. By 2018, more than 500 media outlets were handed over to a government-aligned foundation called KESMA, consolidating control of roughly 80% of the country’s media landscape—a textbook case of state capture. Critical outlets were shuttered, co-opted, or pushed to the margins. The state broadcaster became a mouthpiece. Independent journalism, once a pillar of Hungary’s post-communist rebirth, now survives on the fringes, battered and harassed.
But Orbán’s playbook is not just legal manipulation. It’s emotional. Cultural. Existential. He has framed opposition not as political disagreement, but as betrayal. Migrants, LGBTQ+ people, Brussels bureaucrats — these are the enemies in the narrative. Orbán speaks to Hungarians’ fears: of identity loss, of globalization, of social decay. And then he offers himself as the shield.
The weaponization of fear has been central to Fidesz's survival. Hungary received just 31 asylum applications in 2023—one of the lowest in the EU—yet the government continues to frame migration as a national emergency. Migrants are depicted not as people, but as threats to cultural purity. Disinformation about Muslim ‘invasions’ oods pro-government media, often borrowing language from far-right parties across Europe.
In 2021, Hungary passed a law banning LGBTQ+ content in schools and children's media—an action condemned across Europe as state-sponsored discrimination. Orbán defended it as protecting “traditional values.” In March 2025, Hungary’s parliament voted to ban Pride marches and allow facial recognition to
identify participants. In June, around 200,000 people marched anyway—a reminder that civil resistance, though battered, is not dead.
This isn’t fringe politics. This is the official ideology of a European Union member state—one that receives billions in EU funding from the same democratic alliance it now undermines. Transparency International consistently ranks Hungary as the most corrupt EU country, with a CPI score of 41/100, placing it last among EU members in 2024. It lost more than €1 billion in EU cohesion funds due to rule-of-law violations. Yet Orbán remains unshaken. Why? Because his power isn’t built on democratic legitimacy—it’s built on control.
Part of that control comes from exploiting economic malaise. Hungary’s inflation peaked at 25.7% in 2022—one of the highest in Europe—and though it moderated in 2023, prices remain elevated, deepening inequality. Orbán blamed foreign investors, “Brussels bureaucrats,” and multinational corporations, redirecting frustration away from systemic corruption. Meanwhile, his government funded media campaigns portraying the EU and George Soros as existential threats.
That control extends into the justice system. Independent courts have been systematically weakened. A 2023 plan to create separate administrative courts for politically sensitive cases would place judicial decisions under executive oversight, undermining judicial independence. Critics, academics, and NGOs face harassment, tax
investigations, or defunding. When the EU demands reform, Orbán accuses it of “colonizing” Hungary. When journalists expose graft, he labels them traitors.
This isn’t democracy. It’s a stage play.
And yet, it works. There are no tanks. No midnight arrests. Just a thousand quiet changes—a rule rewritten here, a judge replaced there. Slowly, democracy becomes unrecognizable: a system where people can vote, but only for options curated by those already in power.
The tragedy is not that Hungary stands alone. It’s that it doesn’t. Orbán’s success has inspired imitators in Poland and beyond. In Western Europe, fringe leaders praise his model; in the U.S., Donald Trump described Orbán as a “fantastic leader” and invited him to CPAC.
This is how democracy retreats: not with an explosion, but with applause. When fear outweighs hope. When identity is weaponized. When people begin to mistake elections for freedom. The Hungarian model isn’t a historical warning—it’s a real-time blueprint—and unless confronted, others will follow it.
What begins as an exception becomes a rule the moment no one pushes back.
Ignoring Hungary’s decline normalizes a dangerous precedent: that you can gut institutions, rewrite rules, scapegoat minorities, and still wear the cloak of democracy. As the 2025 EU parliamentary elections loom, the question is no longer whether Hungary will change course—it’s whether Europe—and the democratic world—will care enough to hold the line.
If democracy is to survive the twenty-first century, it must be defended not just at the ballot box, but in everyday institutions: transparent media, independent schools, fair markets, and empowered minorities. Because democracy isn’t a destination; it’s a decision made again and again at every crossroads.
And the rest of us? We’d be wrong to think we’re immune. We watch from a distance, forgetting that distance can shrink overnight.