Building Global Democracy

Welcome to the geo-information age. Along with cyberprobes and computer worms like Stuxnet, which at least temporarily disabled Iran's centrifuges without a missile being fired or a bomb dropped, Wikileaks is redefining national security as we've known it.

Is Internet freedom an absolute, universal value like freedom of speech? If there are limits, how and by whom can they be established? Is crying fire or scaling firewalls anymore acceptable in cyberspace than in physical space? What is the impact on the discourse between nations, cultures and individuals? In this section, we gather a collage of comments from various key players from Google to Wikileaks to the US State Department along with comments by one of the most cogent analysts of the Net and the president of Turkey. ERIC SCHMIDT1, JARED COHEN2, HILLARY CLINTON3, BERNARD KOUCHNER4, JULIAN ASSANGE5

This paper examines countries' free-riding incentives in international environmental agreements (IEAs) when, first, the treaty is non-enforceable, and, second, countries do not have complete information about other countries' non-compliance cost. We analyze a signaling model whereby the country leading the negotiations of the international agreement can reveal its own non-compliance costs through the commitment level it signs in the IEA. Our results show that countries' probability of joining the IEA is increasing in the free-riding benefits they can obtain from other countries' compliance, and decreasing in the cost of not complying with the initial terms of the agreement. This paper shows that, when free-riding incentives are strong enough, there is no equilibrium in which all countries join the IEA. Despite not joining the IEA, however, countries invest in clean technologies. Finally, we relate our results with some common observations in international negotiations.

International Relations scholars and policy-makers are increasingly paying greater attention to a new category of fragile and failed states across Asia, Africa, the Balkans, the Caucasus, Latin America and the Middle East. While effective policy responses are necessary to strengthen these politically fractured, economically collapsing and socially divided states, the category itself appears to be more politically and ideologically charged and less critically understood in the context of international relations. There is a general tendency to avoid examining how political and economic policies and military actions by the West contributed to the degeneration of these states. This article seeks to re-examine the causes of state fragility and failure, and critically reviews the current US strategies to rebuild the failed states of Afghanistan and Iraq. It argues that the US-led statebuilding strategies in both countries are based on a wrong diagnosis of the political and social problems, and the solutions offered are also ill-conceived. The article also contends that the Western liberal vision of the state, premised on the Weberian notion, commands less relevance to the fragile and failed states in the non-Western world.

This article argues that media in China today enjoys greater leeway for independent expression than popularly perceived outside that country, and analyzes vectors responsible for this transformation. It discusses Western and Chinese media models and deconstructs the view that while the West provides for free press, media in China provides no room for independent, anti-hegemonic thought streams. It establishes that while both media are subject to similar pressures and identify with a near similar set of social and ethical responsibilities which shape their discourse, the manner in which the two construct discourses are different, and, this manifest difference, rooted in dissimilar cultural, historical and audience realities has resulted in misconceptions regarding Chinese media. To reinforce this argument, the article analyzes articles from the Shanghai Daily, and demonstrates how, much like its Western counterparts, it too represents different sides of the debate even on issues sensitive to the state such as democracy and Tibet, albeit in a uniquely Chinese way. The article examines vectors responsible for transformation of Chinese media in the post liberalization phase, especially the Internet, and the concomitant changes they have brought in media practice. The article emphasizes the need to culturally contextualize media analyses.

What if we listened to issues with the same level of attention we bring to music? What if we participated in our democratic forums and processes like practiced musicians? Using music as a model, are there ways we could improve the quality of discourse in our communities and our country?

A number of scholars have recently claimed that 'stateness' is a prerequisite for democracy. However, a large-N empirical appraisal of this new research agenda is still pending. In this article, we demonstrate that stateness - conceptualized using the twin attributes of the monopoly on the use of force within a sovereign territory and a basic agreement about citizenship - is to a large extent a necessary condition for the four democratic attributes of electoral rights, political liberties, the rule of law, and social rights. However, the analyses also show that stateness is especially critical for the latter two attributes whereas the former two are sometimes encountered in its absence. These results are robust and they fit well into the dominant writings on democratization, which emphasize that in the present 'liberal hegemony' democratic elections are often grafted onto weak states - but that the rule of law and social rights are much more intimately wedded to structural constraints such as stateness.

El Salvador is characterized by the sad record of having one of the highest degrees of violence and crime in Latin America. Recent governments have tried to fight it with programmes called 'mano dura' or 'super-mano dura' with measures and practices that have often violated human rights and judicial guarantees. This paper aims to explore the Supreme Court's role in the application of these policies by the Salvadoran government. We discovered that the highest court in this country supports this kind of policies termed by some analysts 'policies of punitive populism'. In this sense, the Constitutional Chamber acted in contrast to what is required by democratic theory. The paper proceeds as follows: in the first part we analyse the theoretical framework of public safety policies and frame the Salvadoran case. In the second part, we explore the Supreme Court cases that support (or not) these policies, examining the performance of the court in relation to these cases. The last part is a summary of our evidence.

Pakistan's 1988 transition to democracy defies most of the conventional wisdom on democratization as well as the bulk of the literature on democratic transitions. This peculiar case can be understood as a case of 'temporary democracy', in which democracy emerges as a short-term outcome that is not likely to be sustained. Pakistan's military leaders chose to democratize because of the high short-term costs of repression coupled with the low long-term costs of allowing democracy. The authoritarian elite agreed to allow democratization knowing that the prospects of democratic consolidation were dim. In this sense, the same factors that made the consolidation of Pakistan's democracy unlikely made the transition possible.

Starting from the 1980s, institutions of direct democracy were introduced into most Latin American constitutions. To date, the practical application of these institutions remains almost exclusively restricted to the subtype of government plebiscites while the use of citizen initiated instruments remains scarce. To explain the region's low frequency of use of citizen initiated instruments of direct democracy this explorative study proceeds in three sections. The first recapitulates regulatory legislation on, and practical experience with direct democracy in Latin America. The second proposes and applies an index for the comparative measurement of legal obstacles provided by institutional frameworks and goes on to discuss further explanatory propositions on factors that may interact with these legal obstacles to obstruct direct democratic citizen participation. Finally, these hypotheses are tested through an interview-based study with actors involved in the recent practical experience with direct democracy in Costa Rica. The study concludes that the institutional design of citizen initiated instruments of direct democracy alone does not suffice to explain the frequency of their practical application. Rather than this, application frequency appears to be a function of the combined interactive effects of legal institutional factors with sociological and political party factors such as strategic action preferences and party elites' attitudes.

The democratization literature commonly claims that democratic transitions require an independent civil society. However this view, which builds upon Tocqueville, reifies boundaries between state and society. It also over-predicts the likelihood that independent civil society organizations will engage in confrontation with the government. Drawing upon Hegel, I develop a two-dimensional model of civil society that clusters organizations according to goal orientation and autonomy. This illustrates how high levels of autonomy combined with goals that extend beyond an internal constituency are linked to democratization. I then examine Nigeria's civil society during the era of democratization between 1985 and 1998, and identify important changes in the political opportunity structure. I attribute changes in autonomy and goal orientation of organizations to three factors: transnational organizing, coalition building, and victimization. My findings question the assumption that autonomous organizations will challenge the state. Future research could explore links between the state mobilization during the 1990s and one-party dominance today.

The research for this article was motivated by a noticeable discrepancy between levels of participation and trust in post-socialist civil organizations. While civic participation in Central and Eastern Europe is almost nonexistent, levels of trust in post-socialist civil organizations compare favourably to those in Western Europe. The first aim of this article is to understand why citizens place relatively high trust in post-socialist civil organizations. The political context, within which civil organizations operate, reveals one explanation for the high levels of trust in civil organizations: government corruption dissuades citizens from relying on state institutions and creates a void that is filled by informal networks of association and civil organizations. Empirical evidence demonstrates that trust in civil organizations focused on socioeconomic and political development is higher among citizens who express concern about corruption in their country. The second aim of this article is to understand the discrepancy between levels of trust and civic participation. A novel interpretation of past findings suggests that civil organizations' effectiveness, professionalization, transactional capacity and orientation toward service provision may garner citizens' trust while parallel neglect of grassroots mobilization leaves civil organizations short of capitalizing on that trust. Civil organizations' limited focus on interest aggregation, mobilization and representation raises doubts as to whether observers of civil society in the region should look to these organizations as its core component.

Numerous arguments have been advanced in the academic and policy literature as concerns the democratizing potential of decentralization reforms in third-wave developing and transition countries; numerous also have been the case studies signalling the short-comings of these reforms. In addition, analysis of local political participation has become an important dimension of studies of democratization. Taking the case of Bolivia as an example, this article addresses an issue which has been generally overlooked in this literature, that is the process of constitution of local political agents. Where do political agents come from in the context of democratization of local politics? Additionally, this article raises questions regarding the relationship between greater inclusion and deepening democracy in the local political sphere.

The first wave of academic writings on Islamists emerged in the Arab world after the war of June 1967 and the subsequent resurfacing of religious ideologies and religiously inspired social and political movements. Examples in this first wave include works by the Syrian philosopher Sadiq Jalal al-ʿAzm, the Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, and the Moroccan historian ʿAbdullah al-ʿArawi. These writings advanced three insights. First, the rise of "religious movements," "religious currents," and "religious ideologies"-the term islāmī or Islamist was yet to be coined-was seen by some writers as a serious challenge to the legitimacy of the secular state and the secular idea of Pan-Arabism. Second, other writers accused Arab ruling establishments in modernizing countries-the reference was primarily to post-1967 Egypt-of using religious currents and ideologies to enhance the state's popularity and legitimacy in times of crisis. Third, Wahhabism and petrodollars were held responsible by some for the resurfacing of religious currents and their increased appeal in the contest with secular ideas. Most of the writings of the first wave were Egypt centered and were clearly inspired by an antireligious sentiment that saw religious movements and currents as representing an existential threat to secular modernization and progress

In this article we first trace the ideological development and collective framing of the World Social Forum (WSF) as a non-hierarchical gathering for collaboration and networking within the global justice movement. We then analyze the consequences of organizational design, thematic resonance, and technological innovations implemented to produce more open and horizontal collaboration. We do this by conducting two-mode network analysis of organizations that facilitated sessions and workshops during two separate meetings (2003 and 2005) of the WSF in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Our findings indicate that organizational affiliations were less hierarchical in 2005, but we uncover mixed results from analyzing patterns of interaction produced by individual organizations and groups of organizations. Finally, we discuss the implications of such macro-level innovations on the dynamics of multi-organizational fields (collaboration, coalition building, and thematic resonance) and the contributions of such an approach to the study of transnational organizational networks.

The public demonstrations by Thailand's Red Shirts in early 2010 have been explained as a labour-based movement resisting Bangkok's entrenched elite, or as a mob mobilized by the deposed prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in order to destabilize the current government. This profile looks into the protests' origins and nature. It argues that there are elements of truth to both explanations, but also that the protestors adopted powerful forms of symbolism of poverty and victimhood to draw attention to their needs, and to delegitimize the force used against them. This symbolism allowed both Thaksin and the protestors to gain political ground.

Forest struggles and movements in India were a part of the rich tradition of anti-colonial struggle. In North Bengal, the recorded history of forest movements dates back to the 1960s and the movements themselves have been continuous ever since. However, despite the sincere efforts of those movements the livelihood opportunities of the forest dwellers worsened daily. The 1972 Wildlife Act together with the 1980 Forest Conservation Act strengthened further the oppressive structure of the forest bureaucracy. After the introduction of the Joint Forest Management Programme in the 1990s backed by the 1988 Forest Policy in India, it was expected that the forest dwellers would become more empowered economically and socially in lieu of their participation in the forest protection activities. But this failed miserably in the region and in 2000, against such a backdrop, a movement was started to demand land and livelihood rights for the forest dwellers. Following the Notification of the Forest Rights Act (2006) the movement has gained a new momentum while continuing its struggle against the biased implementation of the Act. This article presents a brief account of the movement in order to assess its significance and changing focuses over the years

To get to that future, however, we have to deal with the present. Capitalism is in crisis, but so is left politics in its traditional forms. The crisis of left politics is unfortunate given the fact that capitalism's manifest inability to meet human needs and protect the ecological integrity of the planet makes socialism more urgent than ever. The mainstream Left is unlikely to overcome its crisis unless and until it, too, starts to recognize this urgency. This urgency, moreover, is increased by the fact that capitalism's crisis is already fueling racism and strengthening neofascist and anti-immigrant political forces.68 To counter these forces and build a better world, socialism must be reinvented. The vision of economic democracy can contribute to this objective, just as the strategy of economic democratization can turn the popular struggles proliferating around the world today into the means through which such a vision comes to life.

This analysis of the institutional design and actual performance of constitutional review in five newly democratized nations in East Asia shows that during the last two decades the judiciary has come to play an increasingly important political role in South Korea, Taiwan and Indonesia. Constitutional courts in these three countries are more active in counterbalancing executive and legislative power than ever before. This however contrasts with the experiences of Thailand and Mongolia where constitutional courts were unable to fulfill a similar function. The discussion for potential explanations for this cross-national variance in court performance supports the critique in parts of the scholarly literature against purely institutional, cultural and structural explanations. Rather, the degree of political uncertainty and diffusion of political power are critical determinants for understanding why politicians comply with court judgments, or attempt to marginalize justices. In addition, the relationship between institutional support, compliance and the area of judicial review matters. In this regard, one lesson of the East Asian comparison is that a too early introduction of review of separation of power conflicts could actually make things worse, by threatening the court's authority and marginalizing its influence. This represents a danger often neglected in the democratization literature that claims judicial control of horizontal accountability mechanisms would necessarily help to consolidate democracy.

Growing contestation has arisen in the Brazilian Amazon regarding two proposed large hydroelectric dam complexes: Belo Monte and Rio Madeira. I explore the intersections between transnational and local contestation of these projects over time. I specifically focus on how scientific research and technical assessments are the field upon which these two different levels of activism operate, reflecting the importance of democracy in science and public involvement therein. I argue that the types of knowledge-based claims activists make and the political constrictions in which they work differentiate transnational and local claims. These cases address questions about the interaction of local and transnational organizers and how highly charged symbolic environmental resources are protected or developed as an outcome of movement struggles. This study also emphasizes the need to recognize hydrological resource development as an aspect of Amazonian development, especially as national and transnational demands for energy and agricultural exports increase.