Building Global Democracy

There will be "elections" in Burma this year. But we should not be fooled into believing they will be free or fair. They will be a sham and will further entrench the military at the heart of power. The new constitution is harsh and one of the most unfair

The use of multilateral institutions to promote and defend democracy is one of the most remarkable recent trends in politics. The novelty of the approach has generated enormous interest among social-science scholars, yet none of the major studies on the s

The current wave of strikes across Europe are only a prelude to what will come, as the ruling elite are not prepared to change their anti-crisis policies that have merely supported the corporations that caused the crisis.

Not only has the world political system failed to prevent these slaughters, it has also struggled to cope with natural disasters and the worst international financial crisis in 60 years. Then, when confronted with an ominous and long-range security threat

The real challenge to the administration of justice in China is, rather, the undue intrusion of politics and, even more broadly, of 'guanxi', the network of interpersonal relations of mutual protection, benefit and dependency that is one of the enduring h

Despite the fact that much has been written about the relationship between Indonesia and Australia with emphasis on the role of government, little has been done in terms of examining Indonesia's changing domestic politics and the role of non-state actors

The aim of this paper is to examine the evolution of recruitment of elites due to globalization. In the last century, the main change that occurred in the way the Western world trained its elites is that meritocracy became the basis for their recruitment.

This study is an effort toward an analytical view on the past two decades of development of civil society in the western Balkans. The development there does not correspond to the theoretical outlines of the democratic transition or transformation. The pri

The few regulatory measures introduced since the financial collapse in 2008 are being supervised by the same banking sector to blame for the crash in first place, writes Financial Times journalist Lucas Zeise. Governments' farming out of supervisory dutie

In this article, I argue that political philosophers like Rawls and Habermas that characterize their methods as non-metaphysical or postmetaphysical depend on constitutions in order to provide a positive and public reference point for democratic participa

Society and Governments: debates and alternatives for a post-crisis world" is the name of a Thematic World Social Forum meeting being held in the capital of the northeastern Brazilian state of Bahia.

The crisis of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has sparked a surge of increased civic engagement by young people in the United States, but there is also evidence of a growing divide along class lines.

We insisted, for example, on a clear distinction between liberalization and democratization. We refused to accept the notion that democracy requires some fixed set of economic or cultural prerequisites. We emphasized the key role of elite interaction and

Viewed through the lenses of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (or CRC), this article critically evaluates the growing controversy surrounding the teaching of human rights in Canada. During a lengthy period of multicultural angst an

In many social science accounts of the role of law enforcement organizations in relation to race and racism, police are positioned as the agents of racialization projects, directly or indirectly carrying out the state's work of demarcating insiders from o

actors who are remolding the landscape of global governance. Emblematic of the new era of "flexibility," these elite players leverage their influence and power by moving in and out of multiple roles, often beyond public scrutiny. For academics, activists,

This article enquires into the implications the modern literature on economic development emanating from international institutions has for law reform and the role of the state in the economy. The main question asked is whether regulation has a uniform ro

A couple days ago, I posted about Pascal Lamy's speech on human rights, where he said, among other things, that "trade measures are the most commonly used instrument in developed countries to put pressure on states violating human rights." Presumably, on

This article aims to identify the main causal factors that underlie the overall levels of mass support for democracy in Hong Kong in the light of two approaches of comparative politics. Using a common questionnaire in 2003, 2005, and 2008, analyses of the

Does democracy influence economic policymaking and outcomes? Our study investigates the implications of Dahl's two dimensions of democracy ('polyarchy'): contestation/competition and inclusion/participation. We hypothesize that increases in democratic com