Building Global Democracy

A lack of coherence among Western leaders, and the use of different standards in judging and then establishing relations with Arab countries on the basis of personal economic and geopolitical interests, has effectively weakened and delayed even more the e

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

The democratic citizen, on whose vote the legitimacy of the entire political mechanism rests, is called upon to reason using his own brain (and to vote in solitude and as an individual), and associate with others to exchange information and opinions, to c

An appeal to Barack Obama to reinvigorate the United States's democracy-promotion efforts in the Arab world is based on flawed understanding both of political Islam and the real needs of the region's people, says Tarek Osman.

the groundswell for democratic change in Arab states and the broader Islamic world began before the turn of the century and continued growing even after President George W. Bush's second-term State Department mostly abandoned the cause. That's been demons

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.

Faced with formidable challenges to expression in Cairo's public spaces, urban blogger activists have developed new ways of articulating dissent, namely spatial tactics ranging from boycott campaigns, cyber-activism and protest art, to innovations in mobi

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 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

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

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

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 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