Building Global Democracy

The paper reflects on the end of the post-Cold War triumphalism that had swept the West and also on the belief that democracy could be a cure all solution to the problems of developing and other countries in the new international system. It argues that th

In this remarkably lucid and deceptively accessible little book, Tilly presents a unified theory of the processes that shape transitions to and from democracy. Although he draws upon his vast knowledge as historian and sociologist, the exposition develops

Political participation is higher among men than women in most parts of the world. However, earlier research has shown that this does not hold true in Scandinavia, including Sweden, where gender differences are remarkably small. This article studies the c

Global governance in an era of human rights is beset by a number of unavoidable paradoxes. One is that as more states are increasingly held accountable for fulfilling legal obligations towards citizens, the same states are also obliged to collude in econo

In a referendum in July 2005 the people of Uganda voted overwhelmingly in support of reintroducing the multiparty system. As a result, one expected an increase in candidates running on party tickets other than the ruling National Resistance Movement (NRM)

Until the early 1990s, the Italian political system was regarded as anomalous among advanced democracies because of its failure to achieve alternation in government. Since then, that problem has been overcome, but Italy has been popularly viewed as contin

After the fall of communism the ascendancy of neoliberalism seemed assured. Democratic government and free market capitalism had been universalized and any serious alternatives to them had disappeared. Rather than the end of ideology, neoliberalism is the

Why did Greek youth take to the streets? For the first time since the second world war young people have no hope of a better life than their parents. But there is also a failure of trust in politicians and all state institutions, particularly the police

'A generation ago, the predominant view among analysts of China was that Chinese leaders in the early 1900s had only a rather limited and confining repertoire of strategic thought available to them. ... But perhaps most important, recent scholarship has d

Human rights and global democracy are widely assumed to be compatible, but the conceptual and practical connection between them has received little attention. As a result, the relationship is under-theorized, and important potential conflicts between them

The first question that we have to ask about promoting democracy is the question of agency: Who are the promoters? Most of the recent arguments have focused on the state, that is, on the already democratic states and, particularly, the United States. Regi

There has been considerable debate about the characteristics of political cleavages underlying post-Communist Central and Eastern European party competition, with views ranging from no structure, to unidimensionality, to structured diversity, to entirely

What could be more emblematic of postwar Japanese democracy than the spontaneous birth of the "citizen" (shimin) in the U.S.-Japan Security Treaty struggle (Anpo toso) of 1960? As the story goes, it was during Anpo that thousands of ordinary citizens came

With voting for the provincial elections in Indian Kashmir safely over, observers say that what was remarkable about the process -- apart from its relative peacefulness -- was the active participation of women in a Muslim-majority state.

Looking beyond the immediate trigger for the subsequent violence - namely, the election itself - the paper instead locates the roots of the crisis within three historical trends: elite fragmentation, political liberalization, and state informalization.The

Three specific themes appear. First, there is a danger of oversimplification of these conflicts as between the international community and national governments. The political struggles tend to be more complicated than generally presented, and internationa

The document below, signed by more than two thousand Chinese citizens, was conceived and written in conscious admiration of the founding of Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia, where, in January 1977, more than two hundred Czech and Slovak intellectuals formed a

This paper argues that the Rwandan government's reconciliation strategy will need to be accompanied by a process of democratisation if it is to achieve its objective of fostering long-term peace. If the discourse of national unity is not reflected in an e

This article examines the origins and evolution of the concepts of 'failed' and 'failing' states, arguing that the terms have come to be used in such widely divergent and problematic ways that they have lost any utility. The article details six serious pr

America's image gap is the central, unmistakable finding from surveys conducted over the course of this decade by the Pew Research Center's Pew Global Attitudes Project. Since 2002, interviewers have polled over 175,000 people in 54 nations and the Palest