Building Global Democracy

Ntandoyenkosi Ncube s'entretient avec MORGAN TSVANGIRAI, le Premier ministre zimbabwéen JOHANNESBURG , 17 mai (IPS) - Le Premier ministre zimbabwéen s'est adressé au parlement le 13 mai, mettant en lumière à la fois les trois mois de progrès et de frustr

When the United States launched the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, the Bush administration expected Iraq to undergo a rapid transition to democracy.1 Although recent progress in Iraq is impressive, reality has not met expectations. This article challenge

A heated debate developed in South Africa as to the meaning of 'deliberative democracy'. This debate is fanned by the claims of 'traditional leaders' that their ways of village-level deliberation and consensus-oriented decision-making are not only a super

This article seeks to shed more light on the consequences of China's aid to and trade with African states. It attempts to answer two questions: First, does China's 'no-strings-attached' policy in Africa constitute a challenge to Western aid paradigms? Sec

Despite possessing relatively well-developed domestic legislative and policy frameworks, corruption continues to be a problem for the island states of the Pacific. The lack of effectiveness can be traced back to issues of capacity. This article shows that

The venue from which President Obama addresses Muslim communities is integral to the substance of his message. While the president and his team are to be commended for extending a hand of cooperation and understanding to the world's Muslims, Egypt's democ

This article deals with the question of parliamentary democracy and female representation in the Arab world in both statistical and historical contexts. The role of women is considered in societies across history from the ancient period to the modern as w

Has democracy promoted poverty alleviation and equity-enhancing reforms in Brazil, a country of striking inequality and destitution? The effects of an open, competitive political system have not been straightforward. Factors that would seem to work toward

Both Cuba and the left-the set of transformative theories and practices that has resisted the expansion of capitalism and the economic, social, political, and cultural relations it has generated-have evolved considerably in the past half century, and the

"Democracy requires the ballot box but is not reducible to it," said British Foreign Secretary David Miliband today, calling for a 'coalition of consent' between the West and the Muslim world. Democracy also requires a thriving civil society, he said, ca

Do Africans tend to view democracy in more procedural or more substantive terms? This article argues that African endorsements of liberal and procedural understandings are not as pervasive as much of the literature on democratization suggests. Drawing upo

The article uses the Iraq example to show that the project of imposing democracy from outside by force is inherently contradictory and likely to fail, for reasons that go beyond the particular circumstances of the country or the Middle East. The paper the

Research on transitions has reached a crossroad. Should it be abandoned because the third wave of transitions to democracy has ended, or should it continue because so much remains unaccounted for regarding the third wave? This paper suggests that regime h

Malaysia's electoral authoritarian system is increasingly coming under pressure. Indicators of this are the metamorphosis of opposition forces since 1998 and, in particular, the results of the 2008 parliamentary elections. From 1957 until 1998 political p

For perhaps the first time since Iran and the U.S. broke ties in 1980, there are real prospects for fundamental change. The new U.S. president, Barack Obama, stated willingness to talk unconditionally. Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, implicitly

the first goal of this article is to organize the emerging diversity in deliberative theory. Although in practice the positions we present fall more or less in between the two types, for illustrative purposes we simplify the task by distinguishing between

Though it is often difficult to know what democracy really means, it has never been hard to say where it started, or when: it all began in Athens about 2,500 years ago. Right? Wrong, according to John Keane, who thinks that our taste for these sorts of fo

This article explores the intersection between the policy of democracy promotion and the political dynamics of change in the Arab world. Based on extensive field research, this article unpacks the resilience of Arab regimes, asking the question: has the p

What happened to the idea of world government, so central in the United States to public debate of the 1930s and 1940s, and why has it been replaced by "global governance"? This article reviews the reasons behind that evolution-the need to incorporate int

This article is critical of a series of works on Chinese soft power which have garnered much attention in recent years. These works typically portray Chinese soft power, characterised by its disregard for Western models of development that propagate 'demo