Building Global Democracy

More than three decades of international best practice and a rich body of scholarship demonstrate that women's policy machinery (WPM) is a crucial tool for promoting feminist policymaking. A new and unstudied form of WPM is emerging at the sub-national le

After 1945, with the defeat of Nazism, until the end of the 1990s, with the rise of the US as the only superpower and the 'triumph of liberalism', it seemed that the West could say, like the Jedis in Star Wars, that 'the Force was with them'. Indeed, to t

In 2006, Poland and Romania embarked on renewed lustration programmes. These late lustration policies expanded the scope and transparency measures associated with lustration as a form of transitional justice. While early lustration measures targeted polit

Slaughter's academic publications on globalist innovations led to greener pastures and she was recently appointed to serve as director of the State Department's policy planning staff under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. In an interview, Slaughter exp

Cooperation is crucial in addressing the current global issues, including the economic crisis and climate change, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon stressed to an international gathering of parliamentarians today in the Ethiopian capital, Addis Ababa.

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

In The divided west and in On the political Jrgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe transpose their political philosophies into the realm of contemporary international politics and put forward two different models for a more equitable order. Habermas defends a

Elitist and technocratic accounts of democracy assume the necessity of leadership and hierarchy, while participatory approaches claim that organisations can be more 'horizontal' yet remain effective. To inform this debate, this paper presents a critical e

Many discussions of deliberative democracy ignore or misunderstand the purposes of the ideal speech situation in Habermas' theory. These purposes are to show the possibility of dissent in actual communication and of supplying a normative standard of socia

In recent years new cross-European protests and movements have developed on global justice and within the loose platform of the European Social Forum (ESF). One of the major challenges for transnational communication and grassroots democracy within the So

The following is the second of a two-part section series. The first section, 'Global capitalism and the states system', brought together a diverse group of scholars to examine a number of issues raised by Alex Callinicos's article 'Does capitalism need th

Alain Badiou is a fierce critic of State-based parliamentary democracy and the supposedly radical democracy that fails to disentangle itself from the Statist logic of representation. This article traces Badiou's alternative proposal of a generic democracy

WASHINGTON, Mar 27 (IPS) - A bipartisan, blue-ribbon task force is urging the United States to formally announce a policy of "positive engagement" with the International Criminal Court (ICC) and send an observer to its 2010 Review Conference. In a report

This article examines the implications of the trial of Jacob Zuma, current president of the ANC, for sexual and gender politics in South Africa. The article argues that a central, contested issue in public debates on the trial was the relationship between

Pakistan is a federation with a chequered democratic history, but this should not prevent us from analysing the ways in which its federal form has influenced identity formation and articulation. The form of Pakistan's federation has changed radically and

Whether one calls it a "League of Democracies" (John McCain) or a "Concert of Democracies" (John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter), the idea that democratic states should establish their own exclusive venues for international cooperation provides an opp

This essay tries to trace the life trajectory of an intellectual, in terms of his intellectual and social practices, who wants to live through modern Korean history via progressive activism. The trajectory can be divided into three different stages: the f

This article explores the different perspectives that the political philosophies of John Rawls and Jacques Derrida offer us on the question of the possibility of constitutional democracy and international justice. As will become clear in section I, I also

WASHINGTON, Mar 19 (IPS) - The U.S. should stop focusing on universalising Western democracy and instead work on constructing an international order that grants full legitimacy to responsible non-democratic states, argues an influential new paper that has

Pakistan narrowly avoided turning a political stand-off into a full-blown constitutional crisis this week (see the ever-useful POMED roundup), not least due to the critical role played by civil society, especially the independent lawyers' movement.