Building Global Democracy

More than fifty countries have adopted quota laws to regulate the selection or election of women to political office. This suggests that states have begun to identify quotas as a new state-led strategy for incorporating women into public life and, by exte

Is it possible, Quentin Skinner asks, that an entire tradition of political thought, including the most influential conception of freedom in anglophone political theory in the past half-century, 'has been insensitive to the range of conditions that can li

Organizaciones defensoras de los derechos humanos criticaron la expulsión de Venezuela de los representantes de Human Rights Watch (HRW), que presentaron un informe en el cual sostienen que la democracia y la tolerancia retrocedieron con el gobierno de Hu

In this article I argue against the view, recently espoused by several authors, that the `incommensurability of values' and `political pespectivism' offer us decisive reasons as to why we should break the link between representation and (the quest for) un

The Bolivian government's determination to hold a referendum, by presidential decree, on a new constitution that it hopes will "re-found" the nation as a "plurinational state," has ceded to pressure from the rightwing opposition. The vote has been postpon

How far did the unanimous agreement on the responsibility to protect at the 2005 UN World Summit really mark the international community's acceptance of a new norm supporting collective action - including ultimately military action - when governments thro

Since 2001 (designated as the UN Year of Dialogue Among Civilisations) several initiatives have been developed as a means of resolving problems whose causes have been ascribed, primarily by Samuel Huntington and Bernard Lewis, to civilisational difference

A talk by Parag Khanna, Director of the Global Governance Initiative of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. In The Second World: Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, Parag Khanna examines the intersection of geopolitics

Twenty years ago Gearid Tuathail called for an approach within Political Geography that made geopolitical culture and the formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specified the task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as the

In August 2008, Russia twice showed that it was not in any way a part of the West. The idea of a renewed confrontation not only does not deter it. It is even popular among Russian voters, however little this may mean in a 'managed democracy'. Russia's pol

Since 2001, world social forums have gradually structured the agendas of thousands of NGOs, medias, unions, social movements, local authorities, institutions and even governments across the planet. Today they are considered as major events to elaborate, s

The development of the theory of deliberative democracy has culminated in a synthesis between Rawlsian political liberalism and Habermasian critical theory. Taking the perspective of conceptions of freedom, this article argues that this synthesis is unfor

An analysis of the literary representations of women and violence in three postwar Salvadoran narratives sheds light on El Salvador's new neoliberal reality and provides a basis for understanding the role of women in national reconstruction and democratiz

Public reasoning is widely thought to be essential to democracy, but there is much disagreement about whether such deliberation should be constrained by a principle of public reason, which may seem to conflict with important democratic values. This paper

This essay is based on a reading of a selection of texts that have been published around the tenth anniversary of South Africa's much celebrated democratic election of 1994, though not necessarily for that purpose. It focuses mainly on political commentar

The articles that follow are usefully located in the context of four dimensions of 'climate justice', defined here as the study of the special problems of obligation and participation posed by climate impacts and policies for their management. The themes

In his new book, 'Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia' (Viking, 2008), Rashid demonstrates that the failures and contradictions of U.S. policy in the region have been visible

The ways in which international non-governmental development organizations (INGDOs) engage with northern constituencies have important implications for their promotion of principles of global justice and equity, their legitimacy as global actors and their

This article seeks to contest the frequently repeated assertion that anger poses the greatest threat to transitional societies moving from authoritarianism to democracy. Against suggestions that victims of past injustices should forswear their `negative e

This essay argues that the territorial fluidity of the process of surplus production has been accompanied by a new form of imperialism, resting on a structural separation of the processes of surplus appropriation and distribution from the processes of sur