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Contents contributed and discussions participated by Arabica Robusta

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Arabica Robusta

Latin America's Document-Driven Revolutions - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2009021601468_2.html

latin america constitution chavez venezuela bolivia ecuador

shared by Arabica Robusta on 14 Dec 09 - No snapshot
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 14 Dec 09
     
    This article makes important points about current Latin American constitution-writing but does not examine how such constitutions were written in the first place. The ability of people to argue that the Honduran constitution supports a coup, shows the importance of knowing the history of Latin American constitutions.
Arabica Robusta

Democracy and democracy-support: a new era | open Democracy News Analysis - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...nd-democracy-support-a-new-era

democratization fukuyama david held

shared by Arabica Robusta on 29 Mar 09 - Snapshot
  • The "end of the end of history" has many architects. Today, several states (an increasingly assertive Russia and China in particular) embody alternative political models that have come to challenge any notion of liberal-democratic hegemony; others (such as Venezuela and Iran) experiment with forms of rule that too take them further away from its orbit. These models and forms face many problems of their own, but they may not be quite as unattractive - either to the people of these countries or to many observers around the world - as lingering triumphalists in the west might assume.
  • There has been a tendency to focus the work of democracy-support in very practical ways: toolkits, implementation, strategy and policy. This was and remains essential; but there is also a need to reflect on the underpinnings of these practices in how democracy itself is understood in this new, testing global environment.
  • The dominance of a liberal-democratic conception with an American accent is reflected in the overwhelming predominance of United States institutions, academics, journals - and ideas - in the democracy-support "industry". Again, this is not in itself a problem: all discourses of democracy are grounded in specific social-political contexts and  power-relations. But the current circumstances of the kind described above - authoritarian challenges, stalled democratic transitions, discontent with democracy, deep and growing economic problems - suggest that an expanded understanding of democracy might be a route towards a healthy redefinition of democracy-support.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This is not to advocate a simplistic "mix and match" approach, but to suggest that a creative inclusion of new elements from different sources could contribute to democracy's rethinking from within.
  • For most people, at the heart of democracy is toleration of difference combined with an openness to listen to a plurality of voices and opinions. This makes it more than a little strange that there is so little debate over what democracy can and should mean in relation to democracy-support. The logic here is that democracy-support itself needs to be "democratised" - in part by engaging in continuing dialogue, interaction and learning between communities moving to democracy and those seeking to support these processes.
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 29 Mar 09
     
    This article is good in that it advocates examination of the many models of democratization/democracy. However, it does not adequately question the terms of the debate, in particularly looking more deeply at how the movement is driven and what the role of corporations and other key exploiters (members of the "capital class"?) is.
Arabica Robusta

Economics, the soulful science | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...soulful_science_4369.jsp

shared by Arabica Robusta on 18 May 08 - Snapshot
  • I believe (as I argue in my book The Soulful Science) that economics offers a uniquely powerful way of thinking about society, and how individuals make choices in their social context. Other approaches, those of the other social sciences, or history or literature and music, are valid too - I feel no need to dismiss them. But only economics with its choice-based models emphasises the opportunity costs and trade-offs that inevitably arise from the social and physical realities of our existence.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 18 May 08
       
      Perhaps the reason why so many 'non-economists' as well as non-neoclassical-economics are dismissive of neoclassical economics (even of the neoinstitutional sort) is that so many celebrated neoclassical economists combine study of a discipline whose assumptions are relevant only to a very restrictive set of uses, with arrogant and misguided proclamations that neoclassical economics is the savior of the social sciences.
Arabica Robusta

Tibet, Palestine and the politics of failure | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ne-and-the-politics-of-failure

independence opendemocracy palestine postcolonial sovereignty tibet

shared by Arabica Robusta on 12 May 08 - Snapshot
  • The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 12 May 08
     
    The victims of "post-colonial sequestration", by contrast, failed to make it past the barrier of independence and international recognition. Instead they fell into a state of half-recognised, but contested, existence. After the war of 1948-49 the "Palestine question" disappeared almost entirely from the international scene, only to re-emerge with the defeat of the Arab armies in the six-day war of 1967. Tibet too has undergone long years of neglect in the international arena, punctuated by periodic (and notably near-half-century) reincarnations of interest: the bloody British occupation of Lhasa in 1904-05, the insurrection against Chinese rule and flight of the Dalai Lama in 1959, and now the uprising of March 2008 (see Gabriel Lafitte, "Tibet: revolt with memories", 18 March 2008).
Arabica Robusta

FT.com / Comment & analysis / Comment - Ethical finance standards must be restored - 0 views

www.ft.com/...fc-11dd-82ae-000077b07658.html

shared by Arabica Robusta on 09 May 08 - Snapshot

  • it should be apparent to all of us that sometimes senior executives, including the chairman, do not fully understand the businesses in which the company is involved.

    The financial instruments
    now causing such turmoil were not properly priced for their inherent risk and managers were unaware of the integral problems with these instruments. Much of this was made possible by the advanced technology used to devise and distribute these instruments.

    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 10 May 08
       
      A good example of "strategic naivete". Financiers pretend they did not know that their structures of speculative greed would cause so much ruin. "Plausible deniability"
Arabica Robusta

Can democracy save the planet? | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...can_democracy_save_the_planet

democracy development international opendemocracy sustainable

shared by Arabica Robusta on 05 May 08 - Snapshot
  • The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people
    vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even
    forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global
    powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more
    sustainable forms of development?
  • What of the link between democracy and
    sustainable development? Most respondents held that voter pressure meant that
    democracy was of benefit to sustainable development. Yet consultation with
    a more specialised group of experts found that only 28% believed that
    capitalism (often paired with democracy in its liberal variant) aided
    sustainable development, against 36% who said that capitalism inhibited it.
    Overall, Doug Miller saw in the figures an activation of people's survival
    instinct: as the planet "speaks" through extreme weather events, citizens are
    starting to listen.
  • Many of the issues the roundtable addressed had been
    highlighted in a keynote paper commissioned ahead of the meeting from Ian
    Christie. This made four basic propositions about democracy, ecologically
    sustainable development, and environmental/sustainability campaign
    organisations (SD-NGOs). He argued that together, these phenomena offer a
    paradox about the relationship between democracy, civil society and
    sustainability; and that resolving it is now an urgent and complex task - for
    the west, for newly industrialised democracies, and for emergent democratic civil
    society in the global south.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Democracy poses huge problems
    for sustainable development. In the advanced liberal capitalist states, democracy
    is tightly coupled to the promise of economic growth, ever-rising consumption
    and individual freedom. Democracy in such states now entrenches the interests
    of the affluent majority and well-funded lobbies in the political system (a
    point analysed by, among others, JK Galbraith and Mancur Olson).
  • Environmental/sustainability
    campaign organisations (SD-NGOs) are a massive success for civil society
    worldwide. Without them, we would not have anything like the progress we have
    seen in the past half-century in protecting the environment, cutting pollution,
    raising resource efficiency, highlighting linked issues of environmental and
    social injustice, and saving wildlife and habitats from destruction. Without
    them, the discourse and practice of sustainable development would not have
    become established in governments worldwide, and huge issues such as climate
    disruption would not have been acknowledged or tackled sufficiently by
    governments and businesses.
  • SD-NGOs are a massive failure by their own
    standards. For nearly fifty years they have campaigned and educated citizens
    and governments and businesses worldwide; yet ecological damage continues on a
    vast scale, environmental injustices abound, and dangerous climate disruption
    seems to be unavoidable. SD-NGOs have achieved limited gains in specific areas
    of policy but have failed to mobilise and energise citizens on a large enough
    scale to put real pressure on politicians and businesses in the west and
    beyond. Moreover, they lack clear answers to challenges to their own legitimacy
    and accountability, and have sometimes spoken as though they were representative
    voices of "civil society", when in fact they constitute a small and highly
    unrepresentative section of it in many countries.
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 05 May 08
     
    a Consultation on Democracy and Sustainability was held at the Science Museum in London on 18 March 2008. It was convened by the Environment Foundation, the 21st Century Trust and SustainAbility, and supported by the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation.

    The questions addressed included: can a world of 9-10 billion people vote its way to a sustainable future - or are new forms of leadership (even forms of authoritarian rule) going to be necessary? Are the rising global powers (China, India and Brazil among them) best placed to move towards more sustainable forms of development?

    Democracy has a central role to play in any discussion of the future of the planet. But democracy is in trouble in many parts of the world, and must - if it is to deliver, remain relevant and meet people's needs and aspirations - mutate and evolve (see Larry Diamond, "The Democratic Rollback", Foreign Affairs [March-April 2008]).
Arabica Robusta

Philanthropy on the commons | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...philanthropy_on_the_commons

democracy opensource peertopeer philanthropy social_change

shared by Arabica Robusta on 26 Apr 08 - Snapshot
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 26 Apr 08
     
    The future of philanthropy lies in joining the wave of open source peer-production that is enriching public assets, says Mark Surman.
Arabica Robusta

Philanthrocapitalism: after the goldrush | openDemocracy - 0 views

www.opendemocracy.net/...ocapitalism_after_the_goldrush

business development international nongovernmental philanthrocapitalism philanthropy

shared by Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08 - Snapshot
  • Arabica Robusta
    Arabica Robusta on 23 Apr 08
     
    "Wealth is like an orchard", says the Mexican philanthrocapitalist Carlos Slim, "you have to distribute the fruit, not the branch", presumably because the branch, tree and forest all belong to him.
Arabica Robusta

ZNet |Activism | Online Activism 2.0: Movement Building - 0 views

www.zmag.org/...showarticle.cfm

shared by Arabica Robusta on 16 Apr 08 - Snapshot
  • Another successful story was my experience organizing against sweatshops with the Notre Dame Progressive Student Alliance as part of the United Students Against Sweatshops network. We were adequately connected to the network to model our local campaign on those of other groups – and we won.
    • Arabica Robusta
      Arabica Robusta on 16 Apr 08
       
      It is critical, in the context of sweatshops, petroleum corporations and so on, to concentrate movement strategies on the global level. In this case, the connections (or lack of connections) with international sweatshop organizations should be more explicit.
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