Building Global Democracy

This article considers the idea of commonwealth as a means of understanding human "politics" that does not rely on the violence of the state. It considers the idea of commonwealth to involve cultural and other forms of ties that transcend the borders of s

Considerable progress has been made in the field of transitional justice in recent years, signified by such landmarks as a permanent international criminal court. Unaddressed aspects of transition remain, however, which need serious attention if peace is

There is much concern in the social sciences and humanities today about how people are connected with and responsible to those who live in distant places. Recent examples are abundant: from climate change to the cyclone that hit Burma in 2008. At the same

Diamond's professional background as a political scientist makes it imperative that Squandered Victory also contain a look into the future. The lessons he offers for the next American intervention are direct consequences of the blunders listed above. Cons

This article's main argument complements the literature on transitions to democracy by focusing on the long-term process of political- elite formation and its influence on the ability of political elites to lead a peaceful and stable transition to democra

This article is critical of a series of works on Chinese soft power which have garnered much attention in recent years. These works typically portray Chinese soft power, characterised by its disregard for Western models of development that propagate 'demo

A strengthened global governance system is crucial to ensure world food security, the head of the United Nations agriculture arm said today, calling for changes to be made to the parts of the international trade system that led to increased hunger and pov

Though it is often difficult to know what democracy really means, it has never been hard to say where it started, or when: it all began in Athens about 2,500 years ago. Right? Wrong, according to John Keane, who thinks that our taste for these sorts of fo

This article explores the intersection between the policy of democracy promotion and the political dynamics of change in the Arab world. Based on extensive field research, this article unpacks the resilience of Arab regimes, asking the question: has the p

What happened to the idea of world government, so central in the United States to public debate of the 1930s and 1940s, and why has it been replaced by "global governance"? This article reviews the reasons behind that evolution-the need to incorporate int

For perhaps the first time since Iran and the U.S. broke ties in 1980, there are real prospects for fundamental change. The new U.S. president, Barack Obama, stated willingness to talk unconditionally. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, implicitly

the first goal of this article is to organize the emerging diversity in deliberative theory. Although in practice the positions we present fall more or less in between the two types, for illustrative purposes we simplify the task by distinguishing between

Research on transitions has reached a crossroad. Should it be abandoned because the third wave of transitions to democracy has ended, or should it continue because so much remains unaccounted for regarding the third wave? This paper suggests that regime h

Malaysia's electoral authoritarian system is increasingly coming under pressure. Indicators of this are the metamorphosis of opposition forces since 1998 and, in particular, the results of the 2008 parliamentary elections. From 1957 until 1998 political p

Do Africans tend to view democracy in more procedural or more substantive terms? This article argues that African endorsements of liberal and procedural understandings are not as pervasive as much of the literature on democratization suggests. Drawing upo

The article uses the Iraq example to show that the project of imposing democracy from outside by force is inherently contradictory and likely to fail, for reasons that go beyond the particular circumstances of the country or the Middle East. The paper the

Both Cuba and the left-the set of transformative theories and practices that has resisted the expansion of capitalism and the economic, social, political, and cultural relations it has generated-have evolved considerably in the past half century, and the

"Democracy requires the ballot box but is not reducible to it," said British Foreign Secretary David Miliband today, calling for a 'coalition of consent' between the West and the Muslim world. Democracy also requires a thriving civil society, he said, ca

This article deals with the question of parliamentary democracy and female representation in the Arab world in both statistical and historical contexts. The role of women is considered in societies across history from the ancient period to the modern as w

Has democracy promoted poverty alleviation and equity-enhancing reforms in Brazil, a country of striking inequality and destitution? The effects of an open, competitive political system have not been straightforward. Factors that would seem to work toward