Building Global Democracy

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

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

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

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

Last week brought news that the Egyptian government is circulating a new draft NGO law, one which would severely restrict available space for civil society and criminalize the activities of unregistered civic organizations. A coalition of 41 NGOs, headlin

This article examines the use of gender in constitutions and its significance for gender equality. New democracies, and some older ones, are increasingly including gender provisions in their constitutions. What is the impact of these provisions on women's

This article lays out and defends the role of political parties in cultivating a democratic ethos among citizens. It argues that citizens' commitment to the democratic idea of self-rule requires positive conviction of the worth of collective political age

In addressing democracy, equality, and justice together, we hoped to stimulate discussions that went beyond the sometimes increasingly technical and increasingly discrete literatures that now dominate the study of each concept. The papers fall, rather rou

This article argues that deliberate and unintentional external influences play both direct and indirect roles in advancing non-liberal democratic political rule. Specifically, it identifies four key external factors whereby Russia has strengthened Central

head of the Index on Censorship, which is Britain's leading organization promoting freedom of expression. We are delighted that he has chosen the Carnegie Council to discuss his new book, Freedom for Sale: Why the World Is Trading Democracy for Security.

This article argues that deliberate and unintentional external influences play both direct and indirect roles in advancing non-liberal democratic political rule. Specifically, it identifies four key external factors whereby Russia has strengthened Central

Non-democratic regional powers are increasingly blamed for authoritarian backlashes in formerly democratising countries, or for the persistence of entrenched autocratic regimes in their neighbourhood. Yet there is a striking scarcity of theoretical delibe

Since 2007 an increasing number of articles have diagnosed 'freedom in retreat' and predicted a 'return to the authoritarian great powers'. Highly distinguished scholars warn against the 'democratic rollback', and articles on the resilience of authoritari

Has the last tide of democratization been replaced by a new wave of democratic reversal? Do two decades of international democracy promotion now have to compete with the promotion of authoritarian rule by powers that have resisted democratization internal

This article is about the conceptualization of democracy promotion in political science. It argues that democracy promoters in aid-dependent states do not influence the change and stability of political regimes mostly 'from without', as typically assumed

This article discusses three questions: what is the purpose of 'democratic' institutions and practices in Russia's authoritarian political system; how do these institutions and practices resonate with Russian public opinion; and how do they relate to the

This article examines how and why India, the world's largest democracy, remains sceptical about the idea of promoting its own political order abroad. It first lays down the historical background of India's long abstinence from promoting democracy and desc