Building Global Democracy

Nations in transit 2009 is Freedom House's comparative study of democratic development from Central Europe to Eurasia. It documents how journalists were once again at risk throughout the region, from Croatia to Uzbekistan, and how national governments wer

Over the past 50 years Cuban society has radically transformed its institutions and openly encouraged women to become independent, educated, and empowered. As a result, Cuban women revolutionized gender relations and made much more progress than men. This

Prominent postcolonial thinker Partha Chatterjee's concept of political society is an important one in understanding the vast domain of politics in the 'Third World' which falls outside hegemonic Western notions of the state and civil society. This domain

Democracy promotion in the Middle East has been a foreign policy imperative for every U.S. President for the past three decades. Geoffrey Swenson details the aspirations, projects and outcomes of U.S. - funded democracy building efforts in the Palestinian

Creating new momentum to reverse current trends will require that institutional reforms and legislative programs are not considered merely as technical processes, but as tests of the government's political will to improve governance and as a central part

Strengthening civil society has had a prominent place in the international community's strategy for the West Balkans. Rather than creating an independent and sustainable NGO sector, however, it has made local NGOs largely dependent on the international co

The Copenhagen Climate Summit, held from 7th to 18th December 2009, was a milestone in the relationship between democracy and climate change. As government negotiators at the 15th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

This paper examines the causal link between education and democracy. Motivated by a model whereby educated individuals are in a better position to assess the effects of public policies and hence favour democracy where their opinions matter, the empirical

In this article the author intends to provide general normative guidelines which ought to inform policies concerning the most controversial multicultural claims for a liberal democracy. In order to do that, she proposes a general reconsideration of the st

Taking for granted a radical criticism of the universalistic value of a post-Protestant understanding of religion and of the nexus between political democracy and secularization, the article aims first at framing the perspective of multicultural jurisdict

In the annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World, Nathan Glazer asks how democracies deal with deep divides-"ineraseable" divisions such as race, ethnicity, religion, and native language. One generalization that emerges from a conside

Indonesia is alternately lauded as a democratization success story and derided as an exemplar of low-quality democracy. This article explains both Indonesian democracy's surprising survival and its defects by focusing on how it fended off three potential

Following a democratic transition in 1992, Ghana has made significant efforts to promote a liberal democratic culture and system of government. This paper provides an analysis of the extent to which Ghana's liberal democratic process is being consolidated

This article is about the nature of democracy in environmental politics, with special reference to the issue of representation, and to the issues of speaking and listening. It is argued that politics has always been regarded as concerned with 'speechifyin

To (re)connect and (re-)engage citizens with their governing institutions, many advanced industrial democracies have adopted innovative reforms designed to 'transform' the way citizens interact with public institutions. This article assesses the extent to

Developments in the democratic theory of representation and deliberation enable renewed consideration of the ancient controversy over the proper place of rhetoric in politics. Rhetoric facilitates the making and hearing of representation claims spanning s

This article describes the key features of eBay's user interface and argues that particularly in digital contexts, top-down (i.e. corporate, quasi-governmental, administrative) entities can very effectively enhance their abilities to rationalize and contr

This paper analyzes agency in Pettit's republican conception of freedom. By understanding freedom intersubjectively in terms of agency, Pettit makes an important contribution to the contemporary debate on negative liberty. At the same time, some of the pr

Buoyed by its creditor's hold on the United States and its ability to withstand the harsh winds of recession blowing from across the Pacific, China has graduated in its own mind from an emerging economy to a world power. From their confrontation with Goog

Pakistan, sometimes referred to as 'the most dangerous place on earth', is not typically thought of as a place where popular nonviolent resistance could take root, much less succeed. Citizen apathy, poor governance, and fear of regime repression and terro