Building Global Democracy

Few Europeans had heard of Moldova, a tiny state on the EU's eastern flank, before seeing images of the strife that broke out there in early April 2009 after the Communist Party (PCRM) won reelection in a landslide. Except for their international context,

This article reconsiders the relationship between authoritarian elections and democratization. Examining legislative elections in the Middle East, it argues that elections are best understood as "competitive clientelism," a competition between elites over

On 15 March 2009, Mauricio Funes, the candidate of the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN)-a former guerrilla movement that laid down its arms in 1992 and reconstituted itself as a political party-won the presidential election in El Salvador,

In Freedom's Battle, Gary J. Bass charts the nineteenth-century pre-history of what today we call humanitarian military invention. He offers richly detailed accounts of the Greek independence struggle of the 1820s, the Western intervention in Syria and th

This essay examines Nicaragua's municipal elections of November 2008 against the backdrop of Daniel Ortega's return to the nation's presidency in 2006. While Ortega has engaged in authoritarian practices, municipal-level Sandinista politicians have helped

Director-General Pascal Lamy, in introducing his third monitoring report to the Trade Policy Review Body on 13 July 2009, said "at a time when the global economy is still fragile worldwide and in the face of the unprecedented decline in trade flows, we mu

The symposium title was, and is, meant to link the Prometheus myth to the traumatic recollection of the New World plantation harnessing and confining black bodies and black experiences

George W Bush made democracy-support a central theme of his presidency. Barack Obama, by contrast, has downplayed it. Yet the latter's approach may achieve more effective results, says Mariano Aguirre.

There's a simple way to promote democracy. Set up an international group that only truly democratic states can belong to.

This article discusses the programme of assistance to community-based organisations carried out by the European Union in South Africa during the years 1996-2004. As part of what the author defines as 'micro-assistance to democracy'-since it encourages dem

A constitution, relatively well-run elections and stable elected representative institutions are not sufficient for democratic consolidation. It is argued that democracies require people who are willing to support, defend and sustain them. The article emp

Building sustainable democracy in Africa is a priority under the auspices of Africa-EU Strategic Partnership, thus, capacity building is relevant for this priority policy area. The African Diaspora Policy Center has published a paper which emphasizes the

Political parties' coalitions/alliances are almost a permanent feature of pluralist democracies. Although relatively new to the African continent, for they emerged during the third wave of democratisation in the early 1990s in a bid to oust from power dif

This article studies contemporary national identity formation in Sweden, aiming to shed light on the relationship between democracy, collectivism and individualism. Sweden is selected as a typical case of democratic states which, reflecting processes of i

WASHINGTON, Jul 15 (IPS) - In her first comprehensive policy address since becoming secretary of state nearly six months ago, Hillary Clinton Wednesday called for a "multi-partner'' - as opposed to a "multi-polar" - world" and defended President Barack Ob

The concept of 'policy transfer' is contested. Earlier work has discussed the defining traits, but generally concluded that the dissimilarities of regional and local implementation ensure a simple transfer in the form of a generic template remains elusive

Most theoretical accounts of descriptive representation focus almost exclusively on the question, "Why do certain groups need to be brought into democratic institutions?" They emphasize the democratic gains obtained through adding more voices to the polit

WASHINGTON, Jul 21 (IPS) - Several international companies are named as helping to prolong the more than 12-year conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in a new report by the British-based group Global Witness, released Tuesday. http://www.glo

What is Democracy? That is the question more than 900 participants set out to answer through their videos, in response to the Democracy Video Challenge set up by the US Department of State and many other partners, open for participants from all over the w

South Korea and Taiwan are often cited as successful cases of third-wave democracies where democracy has taken roots. However, electoral volatility is high and disenchantment among citizens is rising, especially regarding the performance of politicians an