Building Global Democracy

In the Legislative Council question-and-answer session yesterday, chief executive Donald Tsang said the public consultation on the electoral arrangements in 2012 would be deferred until the fourth quarter to focus on tackling economic and livelihood conce

Schumpeter's redefinition of representative democracy as merely leadership competition was canonical in postwar political science. Schumpeter denies that individual will, common will, or common good are essential to democracy, but he, and anyone, I conten

This paper reads Sophocles' Antigone contextually, as an exploration of the politics of lamentation and larger conflicts these stand for. Antigone defies Creon's sovereign decree that her brother Polynices, who attacked the city with a foreign army and di

This article takes as its starting point the current scholarly concern with democratic quality, poverty, and inequality. It notes the tendency of political leaderships at the federal level in Mexico and Chile to exclude political pressures that contravene

In past decades a number of countries that have moved away from outright authoritarianism have not transformed into democracies, but rather into regimes that combine democratic and non-democratic characteristics, sometimes labeled hybrid regimes. This art

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

Le vent de la démocratie, qui souffle sur le continent africains depuis une quinzaine d'années, a conduit à la création de structures électorales chargées d'organiser les scrutins. Ces structures fonctionnent tant bien que mal dans certains pays, mais bea

ASEAN's new November 2007 Charter constitutes an effort to move beyond sovereignty protection to economic, political-security and socio-cultural communities by 2020. The Charter also commits its signatories to democracy (for the first time) and human righ

The inconsistencies and setbacks of George W. Bush's Freedom Agenda should not lead the incoming Obama administration to ditch democracy promotion as a foreign policy objective, argues Gideon Rachman. "No Western governments should be comfortable about sh

The inconsistencies in the foreign policy of the Bush administration have ensured that this skepticism has now entered the domestic debate in the United States as well, making the very idea of democracy promotion overseas controversial. So should a new ad

A growing number of scholars, commentators, and pundits describe the contemporary US as an empire. This article argues that these authors have not paid sufficient attention to the historiography of empire and imperialism. Indeed, the historiography of the

As they gradually develop a normative structure to guide their intentional behavior, Chinese leaders will therefore have to find a balance between the traditional Westphalian norms and the newer norms associated with a globalized world. In doing so, they

In my first article marking the 60th anniversary of the genocide convention, I argued that it is states that commit genocide, but only individuals who can be punished by the convention. The convention is therefore capable of punishing perpetrators after t

Who drives change in international economic regimes? While mainstream International Political Economy scholarship has traditionally focused on the major players within states and markets as the key sources of political and economic change, recent studies

Civil society participation in international and European governance is often promoted as a remedy to its much-lamented democratic deficit. We argue in this paper that this claim needs refinement because civil society participation may serve two quite dif

That human rights should be viewed as a complementary aim to the international pursuit of collective security was an intention of the drafters of the Charter and the subsequent Universal Declaration and they were correct to stress that functional relation

Si la Fdration des Carabes fut un chec, elle ne marqua toutefois pas l'arrt de la coopration et de l'intgration rgionales. Les pays caribens membres du Commonwealth sont au cur d'un complexe rseau d'changes et de partenariats, qui dpasse leur propre group

Dans quelle mesure les politiques du Commonwealth refltent-elles une confusion largement rpandue entre croissance et dveloppement, dmocratie et gouvernance? A travers l'tude de la place des Dalits dans une Inde dont le libralisme, le succs conomique et la

Face la mondialisation, aux rivalits internationales, au changement climatique et au crime international, les tats et populations des les du Pacifique disposent de ressources limites. Les tensions politiques au sein de ces socits sont par ailleurs exacer

La Francophonie is an organisation of states united in their common linguistic and historical heritage. It is similar to the Commonwealth in a number of ways, and in particular in believing that democracy is the best political model, even if it is sometim