Building Global Democracy

What do China's leaders mean when they say that the Chinese system is democratic and getting more so? To help answer this question, the influential John L. Thornton China Center at the Brookings Institution offers a translated set of key writings by Yu, a

Democratic states have periodically been threatened by demagogues -- political figures who fashion themselves as leaders of the people but in fact use the levers of government to establish autocratic rule. In this intriguing book, Signer explores the inte

All in all, the world of international digital activism is much more complex that it appears on first sight. As much as I'd like hope that we are already long past the point where most Western governments, agencies, and NGOs operate on the assumption that

Counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen believes that Pakistan could collapse "within months". But Mustafa Qadri reports that in the tribal areas, it is actually the Taliban, not al Qaeda, that is gaining traction

On 22 February 1854, James Buchanan, then the American ambassador in London but soon to be president of the US, celebrated George Washington's birthday with a dinner to which Giuseppe Mazzini and Giuseppe Garibaldi were invited. At Mazzini's request other

For the past decade, the United States has been promoting national transformation in the Balkans. In pushing the independence of Kosovo, Washington policy makers apparently believed that Serbia would acquiesce, most nations would recognize the newest inde

Following a 1999 coup, Pakistan's General Pervez Musharraf ruled by decree with the support of the military. He held a presidential referendum and got his party elected. He amended the constitution to legitimize his military rule. His involvement in the w

BANGKOK, Apr 28 (IPS) - Indonesian voters had a large pool of candidates to select from during early April polling here, 38 parties nominated 12,000 candidates to vie for the 560 seats in the national legislature. July will offer the world's most populo

HARARE, Apr 27 (IPS) - "Are you still unemployed? Take charge and complete the change. We the people shall write our own constitution," read the many bright posters now adorning street walls, lampposts and rubbish bins in Zimbabwe's capital, Harare. The

Obama was right not to jeopardize reconciliation between Ankara and Yerevan. President Barack Obama trod a fine moral line this month between his past campaign promises to use the word genocide to describe the World War I massacres of Armenians in the Ott

Arguments for collaborative rather than adversarial approaches to governance rest partly on two axioms: first, that collaborative approaches mitigate conflict to intermediate levels and second, that collaborative approaches help integrate science and valu

This article examines the function of conflicting threat perceptions as obstacles to the development of a civic national identity in Georgia. The analysis focuses on threats perceived on the internal and external political arenas, as defined by Georgian g

John Rawls's liberal principle of legitimacy states that the essentials of a constitution must be reasonably acceptable to all citizens.1 This principle in effect precludes the possibility of a fully legitimate religious constitutional order, at least in

The vast majority of countries in the world have stood in an "associative relation" of a colonial sort with some other country or countries, at sometime or another. The aim of this article is to probe the implications of that brute fact for contemporary d

In this article we examine the emergence and implications of transnational climate-change governance. We argue that although the study of transnational relations has recently been renewed alongside a burgeoning interest in issues of global governance, the

MELBOURNE, Apr 30 (IPS) - Fiji, a multi-racial, multi-cultural country of 300 islands in the South Pacific, has undergone another coup - the fourth in 22 years. The women of Fiji want their voices to be heard as they work on ways to bring peace back to th

Carson said Africa is important to the United States because of U.S. interests in seeing peace, good governance and economic growth on a continent that is the origin of over 13 percent of Americans, supplies 15 percent of U.S. oil and most of its natural

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) is a prominent example of the contemporary turn towards more hybrid modes of global environmental governance. It epitomizes the trend away from hierarchical state regulation towards softer forms of steering along the

The liberal camp's frustration with the AKP has been fed by the party's harsh attitude to media criticism of its performance. This disenchantment reached new levels in April 2008, when several liberals, including women who promote education for poor girls

Gates reportedly said after meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak that American military assistance to his country is not conditional upon democracy or human rights. I know this only because it is being reported on al-Jazeera. I have not been abl