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BANGKOK, Jul 8 (IPS) - Using the power of his office, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon achieved a rare diplomatic feat during his recent visit to military-ruled Burma. He broke a taboo by delivering a public speech about the lack of democracy and human

In a year of "setbacks and resilience", the most pronounced democratic setbacks came in sub-Saharan Africa and the non-Baltic former Soviet Union, while the most significant progress came in South Asia, notably with the end of military rule in Pakistan an

CHA-AM, Thailand, Feb 28 (IPS) - South-east Asian governments are examining the possibility of using a seven-year-old regional mechanism, known as the ''Bali Process,'' to find an answer to minority Muslim Rohingyas fleeing ethnic cleansing in military-ru

The Iranian revolution of 1979 surprised and challenged many observers of Iran and scholars of revolution. The revolution toppled a regime that had promoted economic development for decades and enjoyed the support of a strong military and a secret police

First, the good news. Fiji's political parties may have taken a first step toward restoring Parliamentary democracy when they met in a cordial atmosphere Friday, March 13 with members of the military backed Interim Government and agreed on the issues to b

International Relations scholars and policy-makers are increasingly paying greater attention to a new category of fragile and failed states across Asia, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Latin America and the Middle East. While effective policy responses are necessary to strengthen these politically fractured, economically collapsing and socially divided states, the category itself appears to be more politically and ideologically charged and less critically understood in the context of international relations. There is a general tendency to avoid examining how political and economic policies and military actions by the West contributed to the degeneration of these states. This article seeks to re-examine the causes of state fragility and failure, and critically reviews the current US strategies to rebuild the failed states of Afghanistan and Iraq. It argues that the US-led statebuilding strategies in both countries are based on a wrong diagnosis of the political and social problems, and the solutions offered are also ill-conceived. The article also contends that the Western liberal vision of the state, premised on the Weberian notion, commands less relevance to the fragile and failed states in the non-Western world.

International Relations (IR) scholarship is directly in the path of two simultaneous tidal waves. The first is the rise of China and India in the traditional IR terms of military and economic power. The second is the expanding nature of what IR scholarship needs to address, as global integration transforms the nature of the issues to be addressed and numerous trends expand the number and types of relevant actors. Neither theory nor practice is yet coping well with the profound implications of these fundamental changes. Investigating what kind of a world order might emerge from these two simultaneous tsunamis will require an enormous research agenda that explores the roles of ideas, structural factors, and path dependencies across regions and issue areas. This article aims to illuminate a subset focused around the connection between theory and practice as related to two emerging powers. It briefly maps developments in Western IR theory and explores how those connect-or fail to connect-with intellectual and policy currents in the rising Asian giants. It draws on a number of interviews and workshops held in Asia in the past two years that explore how Asian scholars and policymakers are dealing with, and perhaps beginning to shape, the rapidly changing conceptual landscape.

Over two decades have passed since the 'third wave' of democratization began to roll across sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. The introduction to this collection provides an overall assessment of the (lack of) progress made in democratization processes in Africa from 1990 to 2010. It highlights seven areas of progress and setbacks: increasingly illegitimate, but ongoing military intervention; regular elections and occasional transfers of power, but realities of democratic rollback and hybrid regimes; democratic institutionalization, but ongoing presidentialism and endemic corruption; the institutionalization of political parties, but widespread ethnic voting and the rise of an exclusionary (and often violent) politics of belonging; increasingly dense civil societies, but local realities of incivility, violence and insecurity; new political freedoms and economic growth, but extensive political controls and uneven development; and the donor community's mixed commitment to, and at times perverse impact on, democracy promotion

Haug pursues two objectives in this essay. First, he wants to develop a better understanding of the global conflicts at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To reach that understanding, it is, he argues, necessary to get beyond the crude empiricist language of the mainstream. Secondly, therefore, he elaborates and further develops certain key aspects of Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony (consensual leadership through multilateralism vs. mere supremacy, "hegemonic sacrifice," etc.) in order better to grasp the lines of conflicts in national as well as international politics. Haug takes as his starting point the guiding question of a 2006 conference in Athens, namely whether the current political conjuncture should be interpreted as one of imperialism or, in Hardt and Negri's sense, as empire. He recasts this question from one of interpretation to one of history, and in so doing he rearticulates the concepts of empire vs. imperialism. He sees transnational high-tech capitalism as having arrived at a crossroads. One path from this crossroads, he argues, leads to rival imperialisms; and the other path leads to the formation of a regulated world market flanked by world ecological and social politics, to, in short, an "empire" of transnational capitalism. The big question underlying Haug's project is this: Will the United States succeed, after the political, military, and economic debacle of the phase of the unilateral "imperialist" politics of George W. Bush, in recovering a political leadership role in the world? The effort of the United States under President Obama to do so must contend with the Bush legacy, consisting of two unwinnable wars, a deep economic crisis that began as a financial crisis, and a politically and culturally divided nation. Haug's essay does not pretend to answer this larger question; its more modest purpose is foundational, that is, to articulate the question more clearly and to establish the prerequisites and criteria for a pro

Held argues that globalisation is undermining democracy at the level of the nation state. Responding to this and to the escalation of military conflict, the mounting scale of environmental problems and increasing global inequality, he argues for the establishment of cosmopolitan democracy to enable the global implementation of social-democratic policies. This article provides an exposition and critical evaluation of cosmopolitan social democracy (CSD), identifying its main strengths and weaknesses, and argues that Held advocates CSD to remedy the world's major problems by reforming the global capitalist order, but that this is unlikely to work because these problems will persist until capitalism is replaced by socialism.

"In 2006, Bangkok's middle-class residents overwhelmingly supported the military coup that displaced the elected government of Thaksin Shinawatra. Survey research shows that opponents of Thaksin had a stronger commitment to liberal democracy and possibly to royalist values while rural voters supported Thaksin because he fulfilled their social demands. Opposition to Thaksin was not motivated by economic interests, but rather, there is some evidence that urban middle- and upper-class voters disliked Thaksin because they heard negative reporting about him, which were less available in the countryside. These findings are compatible with a new theory of democratic consolidation, in which the upper classes have the means that would enable and encourage them to pay sufficient attention to politics to discover that what they viewed as 'good government' was violated by the ruling party, which could have led to demands for more democracy historically. More recently, however, in Thailand and perhaps other instances in Southeast Asia and Latin America, those with the money and leisure to follow politics closely have heard reports about the 'bad government' of populist, democratically elected leaders, and thus have turned against them."

"Does democratization increase commitment to multilateral security? In this article, the author argues that democratic transitions increase the incentives of states to cooperate in multilateral security and that this is observable in the rate at which new democracies ratify international treaties of arms control, nuclear nonproliferation, and disarmament. New democrats, she asserts, seek a positive international reputation as an insurance mechanism against future regime reversals. By becoming "good citizens" of the global system, newly elected democratic leaders seek to expose potential conspirators to the possibility of diplomatic and economic sanctions if they were to attempt to reverse the transition. First, using original data on the ratification rates of 201 states for twenty major arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament treaties, the present study shows conclusively that new democracies outpace older democracies and all autocracies in committing to multilateral security. Second, the study empirically tests whether the swift ratification of security treaties works as a consolidation strategy and finds that, indeed, it does. That is, new democracies that commit to nonproliferation and arms control treaties are less likely to experience a regime reversal."

The article puts the contemporary debate on NATO 'going global' into its historical and conceptual perspective. Pressure to expand alliance responsibilities is not new, rather it is a fundamental problem of alliance goal setting and legitimacy. The pedigr

Promoting democracy abroad may seem like a good way to promote peace. Mature, stable democracies have not fought wars against each other, and they rarely experience civil wars. But the path to a democratic peace is not always smooth. Democratic transitio

The use of multilateral institutions to promote and defend democracy is one of the most remarkable recent trends in politics. The novelty of the approach has generated enormous interest among social-science scholars, yet none of the major studies on the s

South Korea experienced democratic reform relatively recently. Before its significant democratic reform in 1987, South Korea had been dominated by a series of authoritarian regimes over a few decades since its liberation from Japanese colonial rule. This

Britain's 'Contest' counter-terrorism strategy with its '4 Ps' codification is often held up as a paradigm of an effective liberal democratic counter-terror strategy. However, while the strategy has had some success and been widely emulated internationall

Two key themes of this special issue are: how violence challenges democracy and how democratic politics might, over time, diminish violence. This paper explores how violence(s) embedded in Latin America's state formation process are multiplied rather than

EVEN in light of the recent focus on health-care reform, it's a bit astonishing how little attention has been paid to the wrangling in the Senate over three important Patriot Act powers set to expire at the end of the year. While some Democratic senators

In his new book, 'Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia' (Viking, 2008), Rashid demonstrates that the failures and contradictions of U.S. policy in the region have been visible