Building Global Democracy

A major issue raised in the publication is nationalism. The review of the literature on nationalism, quite unlike that of liberal democracy, is dense and comprehensive. Also, the characterization of what Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral wanted (African) na

Recent discourse on U.S. efforts to promote democracy has focused on military activities; especially the strategic and normative perils of democracy promotion at the point of bayonets. This paper explores the United States' use of economic statecraft to f

The sight of thousands of people demonstrating for clean elections and an end to corrupt postcommunist regimes led many observers to declare that the so-called color revolutions had finally brought democracy to Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, and Kyrgyzstan. Bu

EVEN in light of the recent focus on health-care reform, it's a bit astonishing how little attention has been paid to the wrangling in the Senate over three important Patriot Act powers set to expire at the end of the year. While some Democratic senators

Modern liberal democracies demand high and equal levels of political action. Unequal levels of political action between ideological groups may ultimately lead to biased policy. But to what extent do citizens' ideological preferences affect their likelihoo

The annual meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank have run into a predictable roadblock in setting out brave new directions: a roadblock called memory. What could have been an immensely sensible idea of turning the IMF into a new c

Waltz is generally seen as one the most important advocates of a systemic theory of international politics that stresses the importance of international anarchy and marginalizes domestic politics. Locating Waltz's thinking against debates within realism i

In the following article, author argues that virtual worlds are characterized by a particular mode of governmentality. Rather than seeing virtual worlds as analogous to societies in the real world, he suggests regarding them as ''social factories'' in whi

The 'Asian People's Climate Tribunal' was held in a banquet hall of a hotel a short distance away from where government negotiators from the developing and developed world are meeting at the two-week-long United Nations climate change talks that commenced

This article takes as its starting point the important contribution that governmentality studies make to our understanding of the social and political conditions that shape contemporary world politics. However, it suggests that the critical potential of a

This paper revisits Foucault's understanding of the importance of subjectivity for politics, focusing in particular on his claims concerning the sorts of demands placed on the subject by contemporary capitalism. Moves to extend the application of Foucault

While informed by Foucault's understanding of power in terms of war and circulation, this article challenges Foucault's static reading of Hobbes. Contextualising Hobbes's political thought within the scientific ideas that he was inspired by, this article

As more work on governmentality appears in International Relations (IR), it is time to take stock and deal with a few questions. In social theory, the governmentality approach has mainly addressed "advanced liberal" societies and can be defined as having

The post-election crisis of January 2008 brought Kenya close to collapse and the status of a failed state. Following the abrupt proclamation of Mwai Kibaki, the incumbent president, as victor in a highly contentious presidential election, peace was disrup

In recent times, the value of a critical approach to the study of International Relations (IR) that makes use of the concepts and methods of Michel Foucault has (again) been put on trial. I will argue in this article that both Foucauldians and their criti

The analysis of governmentality has had a profound impact on the study of liberal, domestic societies over the last two decades, and the conceptual framework has been applied successfully to current global affairs. In this article one possible way of expa

In an increasingly globalised world effective international communicable diseases control requires states to embrace basic norms informing global health governance. However, recent international public health crises have shown that states continue to use

Speech by Nick Grono, Deputy President of the International Crisis Group, to the Overseas Development Institute, "Peace Versus Justice? Understanding Transitional Justice in Fragile States", 9 October 2009

Does democracy lead to more inclusive and equitable social contracts? Our answer is a qualified "yes." Democratization in Latin America and Eastern Europe increased attention to social policy despite wrenching economic crises. Yet welfare legacies of the

Iran's disputed June 12 presidential election has given rise to an outpouring of public protest and intraelite conflict unprecedented in the thirty-year history of the Islamic Republic. All this has occurred despite the fact that the unelected Council of