Building Global Democracy

The annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have run into a predictable roadblock in setting out brave new directions: a roadblock called memory. What could have been an immensely sensible idea of turning the IMF into a new c

Waltz is generally seen as one the most important advocates of a systemic theory of international politics that stresses the importance of international anarchy and marginalizes domestic politics. Locating Waltz's thinking against debates within realism i

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

Modern liberal democracies demand high and equal levels of political action. Unequal levels of political action between ideological groups may ultimately lead to biased policy. But to what extent do citizens' ideological preferences affect their likelihoo

The sight of thousands of people demonstrating for clean elections and an end to corrupt postcommunist regimes led many observers to declare that the so-called color revolutions had finally brought democracy to Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Bu

Effective deliberation is central to democracy and so should enter any definition of democratization. However, the deliberative aspect now ubiquitous in the theory, practice, and promotion of democracy is generally missing in comparative studies of democr

A major issue raised in the publication is nationalism. The review of the literature on nationalism, quite unlike that of liberal democracy, is dense and comprehensive. Also, the characterization of what Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral wanted (African) na

Recent discourse on U.S. efforts to promote democracy has focused on military activities; especially the strategic and normative perils of democracy promotion at the point of bayonets. This paper explores the United States' use of economic statecraft to f

Does the emerging parallel Community administration share a common set of beliefs about governance and the broad policy direction of European integration? Or do different policy arenas, institutions, and types of committees shape governance beliefs? This

Studies of the relationship between political democracy and economic inequality have produced diverse findings. This study attempts to mitigate some conceptual and methodological problems inherent in such studies by using multi-indicator concepts of inclu

Institutions are essentially broadly agreed norms, rules and routines. They might have arisen out of social conflicts with strong influence of power relations, but they also face the demands of democracy. While studying NGOs as political institutions, par

This paper critically examines the rising popularity of blogging in the US as a new kind of public space that has the potential to extend and deepen the way in which we interact and engage each other in political discourse. To proponents of deliberative d

How should children be educated for democratic politics in ways that do not undermine their diverse needs, ideas, and interests? The dual challenges for a democratic theory of education are, first, to protect the pluralism of the young from standardizatio

Focussing upon recent political philosophical reflections on the War on Terror, this paper asks whether violence can be understood without undermining the empirical and normative potential of public action to curtail it. Explanations of political violence

BANGKOK, Sep 25 (IPS) - The shift in the United States policy towards Burma has been met with mixed reactions, with few believing it will have an impact. But the South-east Asian state's detained opposition leader has already endorsed Washington's move to

Recent democratic transitions in Southeast Asia raise the question as to how we should theorize the relationship between democratization and foreign policy. Many scholars assume that more 'democratic' Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) members

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf implicitly addresses the necessary conditions for equal participation in deliberative democracy. Woolf's analysis indicates that proponents of deliberative democracy must be attentive to the angry, unconscious resist

This article analyzes the impact of the neoconservative foreign policy agenda on wider forms of international cooperation and argues that the unilateral US invasion of Iraq in 2003 has created an international environment of conflict and insecurity where

for a Western audience unfamiliar with al-Jabri's work and the trend which he both represents and has been instrumental in developing, Democracy, Human Rights and Law in Islamic Thought is not only a suitable introduction, it should be required reading.

This essay focuses on how higher education has been reshaped under the influence of a market rationality, however devalued recently, that continues to license out the university as a storefront, reconfigure governance on the model of a discredited busines