Building Global Democracy

The 'Responsibility to Protect' (RtoP) principle represents a commitment to prevent and halt mass atrocity crimes. However, in his 2009 report on implementing the RtoP, the UN Secretary-General noted that more work was needed to understand the measures that states might take to exercise their RtoP. Given that UN peace operations are now customarily mandated to 'protect civilians under imminent threat of physical violence', it would seem prudent to ask how peace operations can contribute to operationalising the RtoP and how the RtoP might support peacekeeping. This article explores the potential for implementing the RtoP through peace operations. It argues that the RtoP and peace operations are mutually reinforcing. Notwithstanding systemic challenges, peace operations offer a legitimate vehicle for implementing RtoP, whereas RtoP provides a facilitating norm for harnessing political will and buttressing the legitimacy and credibility of contemporary peace operations.

When political actors and international relations scholars invoke 'the international community', the term is commonly framed very loosely. It is used either as a reference to the norms of international politics or, according to its composition, as a coalition of concerned actors. This article, by contrast, argues that it is the interplay of image and practice of the term's invocation that shapes its multi-faceted character. 'The international community' can be used by many different groups, state and non-state alike, to locate their political goals in the context of a wider array of values. Usually, these norms are state related and can be used to simulate political relevance. Conversely, actors defying widely accepted values can be excluded and policy against them legitimized. Addressing domestic as well as international audiences, the claim to be acting as, or on behalf of, 'the international community' is mostly virtual but has definite political consequences.

Humanitarianism rivals security in its ability to legitimize emergency measures, and has also proven to be as ambiguous and open to abuse. In this article, humanitarianism is reconceptualized as a sector of securitization, like state and societal securitization, meaning that it is a structured field of practice that draws on existing discourses and institutions to enable the implementation of emergency measures. This reconceptualization contributes to the theory of securitization by expanding its applicability beyond states and societies to humans as referent objects, but also by challenging the Copenhagen School's conceptualization of normality/exceptionality at the domestic and international levels. Drawing on the humanitarian securitization of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, the article demonstrates how the structured security field of humanitarianism privileges particular actors in speaking to human insecurity, and how the humanitarian discourse reifies and reinforces a monolithic form of human identity. The article draws attention to the process of representing developments as humanitarian emergencies and uses the framework of securitization to critically examine the discourses, practices and agents of humanitarianism.

The current US counterinsurgency approach, introduced in 2006, has been highlighted as representing a significant shift in the US military's approach to operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Restraint in the use of force, a focus on development projects and increased awareness of local cultures might be interpreted as signalling the emergence of a more reflective and empathetic US military, with greater acceptance of human security principles. This article contests such an interpretation, arguing that US counterinsurgency contains a range of characteristics that render it an unsuitable tool for addressing the underlying social and political problems of Iraq or Afghanistan, as well as an inappropriate platform for the realization of human security principles. Counterinsurgency retains a significant role for high-impact war-fighting, remains firmly embedded within the narrative of the War on Terror, and is likely to lead to the disempowerment of local populations. Taken together, these interlinked characteristics make the US counterinsurgency model an unlikely vehicle for the development of a long-term positive peace in the societies within which it is being applied and risks seriously compromising the credibility of future attempts to help protect the security and well-being of individuals and groups beyond one's own national borders.

A few years ago, it was a common complaint that the international dimension of democratization and, in particular, the external promotion of democracy were largely neglected by scholars of comparative politics and international relations. By now, academic research has begun to catch up with the growth of foreign and development policies explicitly aiming at the international promotion and protection of democratic regimes. Yet, what is still a largely unexplored desideratum is the challenge to theoretically grasp 'democracy promotion' as an aim and strategy of democratic foreign policies - that is, to embed the empirical research on democracy promotion in theoretical perspectives on international relations. This article sets out to contribute to filling this gap by developing a classification of competing theoretical approaches. First, research on the democratic peace - the one major research program concerned with democratic foreign policy - is used to derive potential motives behind the promotion of democracy. Then, on this basis, existing theories of international relations are modified in order to locate democracy promotion within the foreign policy of democratic states. In conclusion, the article presents four sketches of potential theoretical approaches to the external promotion of democracy.

The issue of how to achieve change-in short of how to act-in a complex international system of 192 member states, without authoritative structures, or even a clear hierarchy of power, has been neglected in the literature of the academic subject of international relations. The focus has been predominantly on structures at the expense less of individual actors-much is written about the foreign policies of the major powers-than of the problem of agency itself. In terms of effecting significant change, how much is it reasonable to expect, and of whom? This lecture, which was given to mark the establishment of the new Department of Politics and International Studies at Cambridge, surveys the parameters of the problems of action, concluding that while states are still the most important site of agency at the international level the critical dilemma is now that of accepting and managing complexity and diversity. In particular the West must accept that its ability to provide leadership, unquestioned over the last two centuries, can no longer be assumed.

Foreign policy crises have traditionally been seen as turning points. Avoiding crises or, if they occur, resolving them has been a key objective of international politics. Historically, responses to crises have followed clear and predictable patterns: power centralizes around the leader of the executive, who, in turn, uses such power to formulate a seemingly unambiguous response that should lead to a clear end, the resolution of the crisis. This framework has been applied to events ranging from world wars to short-term events and is enshrined in many state constitutions, as well as built into national bureaucratic systems. It is based on order, reductionism, predictability and determinism. In this work, it will be argued that such responses are based on a misconception of what crises represent. It will be shown that crises represent complex adaptive systems. Political leaders should respond to crises by quickly decentralizing the policy process in order to enable a process of self-organization. Suggestions will be made on how this should be done.

This study examines the role of the media in sustaining regime stability in an authoritarian context. The article engages the recent work on authoritarian resilience in comparative politics but goes beyond the standard focus on elections to other important institutions, such as the media and courts, that are used by authoritarian leaders to bolster legitimacy. The authors find that the Chinese media contribute to regime legitimacy and effective rule by propagandizing citizens' experiences in the legal system. However, unlike the "mouthpieces" of earlier communist regimes, the marketized Chinese media provide more convincing and sophisticated messages that continue to accord with state censorship demands while satisfying readers' interest in real-life stories and problems. The "positive propaganda" and the relative uniformity of information sources because of state censorship lead aggrieved citizens to the law as a realm for dispute resolution and rights protection. Statistical analysis of a randomly sampled survey conducted in four Chinese cities in 2005 demonstrates that exposure to media reporting about labor-law-related issues successfully promotes the image of a proworker bias in the law among citizens, thus encouraging them to participate in the legal system. The state is able to achieve its political goal because of the lack of conflicting sources of information and the lack of previous experience with the reformed legal system among citizens.

Given its contribution to enhancing the inclusiveness, responsiveness, transparency and accountability of socio-political decision-making, the deliberative model has achieved considerable prominence in recent times as a basis for revitalizing democracy. But notwithstanding its strengths, it has also become clear that the deliberative proposal exhibits certain weaknesses that stand in need of correction if it is to realize its potential for revitalizing democracy in our contemporary pluralistic and multicultural world. Not surprisingly, then, there have been calls for significant modifications to the core proposal. Of particular interest for present purposes is Iris Marion Young's call for a 'communicative' reappropriation of the standard model with a view to rendering it more inclusive of and responsive to difference.

Indonesia, the world's third largest democracy, has been called a template for Muslim political reform and has the potential to serve as a bridge between the United States and the Islamic world. Indonesian journalists play a vital role. Since the collapse of the Suharto regime in the late 1990s, the Indonesian media sector has experienced its own revolution. A nationwide survey of 600 Indonesian journalists finds that while the influence of Islam in the newsroom is increasing, journalists support the separation of mosque and state and reject militant Islam. Their attitude toward the United States has improved under Obama and, while skeptical of American motives, they support continued American aid. Although most reject Suharto-era government-mouthpiece media functions, they have not yet fully embraced the role of watchdog. They say that the industry as a whole, and they as individuals, are still not free, but cite their own lack of professionalism and poor ethics as the greatest threat to their industry. The echo of the development journalism model that prevailed in the Suharto years can be seen in the top priorities of Indonesian journalists.

Over two decades have passed since the 'third wave' of democratization began to roll across sub-Saharan Africa in the early 1990s. The introduction to this collection provides an overall assessment of the (lack of) progress made in democratization processes in Africa from 1990 to 2010. It highlights seven areas of progress and setbacks: increasingly illegitimate, but ongoing military intervention; regular elections and occasional transfers of power, but realities of democratic rollback and hybrid regimes; democratic institutionalization, but ongoing presidentialism and endemic corruption; the institutionalization of political parties, but widespread ethnic voting and the rise of an exclusionary (and often violent) politics of belonging; increasingly dense civil societies, but local realities of incivility, violence and insecurity; new political freedoms and economic growth, but extensive political controls and uneven development; and the donor community's mixed commitment to, and at times perverse impact on, democracy promotion

The main objective of the article is to review relevant literature on (competing) public values in public management and to present a number of perspectives on how to deal with value conflicts in different administrative settings and contexts. We start this symposium with the assumption that value conflicts are prevalent, the public context can be characterized by value pluralism, and instrumental rationality does not seem to be the most useful to understand or improve value conflicts in public governance. This begs the question: what is the best way to study and manage value conflicts? The contributions to this symposium issue approach value conflicts in public governance from different perspectives, within different countries and different administrative and management systems, hoping to contribute to the debate on how to deal with important yet conflicting public values in public management, without pretending to offer a conclusive strategy or approach.This introductory article also presents and reviews the contributions to this symposium issue.

The motivation of civil servants to serve the public has gained considerable attention among public administration scholars and practitioners. The obvious substantive interpretation of serving the general interest is at odds with public service motivation being predominantly applied instrumentally, as a means to attain employee and organizational performance. There is a comparable situation with the oath of office, which can be regarded as a highly symbolic indicator for civil service motivation as such. The oath of office is regarded predominantly as an integrity tool, at the expense of its embedded substantive meanings. We will argue that in both cases there is a risk for a blind spot for adverse effects, that is, unwanted outcomes and the annihilation of exactly the social significance of the phenomenon in question. The lesson is that public service motivation has to be analyzed from a more encompassing perspective, acknowledging the interlocking of instrumental usage and substantive meaning. In organizational practice public service motivation (and the oath of office) should be used with care in order to warrant successful and meaningful deployment.

Voluntary services and the word 'volunteer' have been discursively highlighted as something 'new' in China in the last few years. The large number of volunteers involved in relief work following the 5/12 Sichuan earthquakes, in the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and in the 2010 Shanghai Expo are examples of this yet understudied phenomenon. This article aims to examine volunteerism and its close relationship with the production of model citizens. It attempts to shed light on how China uses soft power - through appeal and attraction - in its governing strategies. Informed by Foucault's work on governmentality, this article aims to show how promotional strategies and training materials pertaining to volunteering programmes acted as governing strategies that invoked and produced specific power relationships through which the state governed its citizens. Taking the Beijing Olympic volunteer programme as a case to examine how a new model citizenry is produced, I trace three discourses: dream and glory, hosting a great Olympics, and not to 'lose face'. These discourses shape citizens' everyday lives; they help volunteers internalize and embody the ideal of a model citizen, and as such they are part of the organized practices through which subjects are governed in China.

"This essay considers recent critiques of postcolonial theory and proposes democracy as a theme likely to prove crucial for the future of the field. It argues that a properly postcolonial turn toward democracy demands a new philosophical, political, and ethical valuation of the concept of naïveté."

Over the past three decades, China has been undergoing tremendous transformations in nearly every domain of social, economic, and political life. These rapid changes offer both new challenges and opportunities for China scholars to reflect upon the relevance and analytical power of many existing theoretical frameworks and categories in this new context. There have been desires and efforts to search for innovative or alternative conceptual lenses in order to better understand the emerging, heterogeneous social configurations and make sense of the contemporary conditions of life presented by China and beyond. Carolyn Hsu's thoughtful article (Hsu, 2010) is a useful and welcome experiment in this direction. I very much appreciate the opportunity to engage her work in a constructive spirit.

This two-part article discusses developments in the first decade of the 21st century and uses the comparative world-systems perspective to consider possible scenarios for the next several decades. In Part One that follows, we consider the likely trends of the 21st century and the major challenges that humanity will face, noting some disturbing similarities, but also some important differences, between what happened during the late 19th century and the first half of the 20th century and what seems to be happening in the early 21st century. There are three major crises looming: 1) Massive global inequalities; 2) Ecological degradation; and, 3) A failed system of global governance in the wake of US hegemonic decline. The timing and strength of these challenges and their interactions will greatly influence their severity and the possible solutions; however, as in the past, large challenges are also opportunities for innovation and for reorganising human institutions. In Part Two, published in the next issue, we discuss the major structural alternatives for the trajectory of the world-system during the 21st century, positing three basic scenarios: 1) Another round of US economic and political hegemony; 2) Collapse; and, 3) Capable, democratic, multilateral, and legitimate global governance.

African countries should initiate dialogue between government, student leaders, and university managers and professionals on student development as a pathway to democratic citizenship-building on the continent, new research has proposed. There should be in-depth investigations into democratic best practice regarding student development, and especially student leadership development, with the findings presented in handbooks for use by student development professionals in African universities.

Slum dweller federations, like many other social movements, cater for the youth in their constituencies. This is critical to their relevance as agents of change and contributes to the sustainability of the movements. However, the youth formations are not merely scaled-down versions of the movements and often grapple with a set of dynamics unique to that transitory period in life. This story is a case study of the youth federation that is aligned to Kenya's slum dwellers federation.

There is no 'finished product democracy'. How should democracy or self-rule be explained and evaluated today? It requires respect for the democracy of knowledge. A global conversation held at three international meetings, involving academics, civil society and social movement activists from Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America and North America, has issued in a Democracy Manifesto for our fast-moving times. We publish initial responses from participants each day this week to continue this conversation in the public domain.