Building Global Democracy

Development aid and democracy support have become increasingly interconnected, but cooperation between them is only partial and its future uncertain. Traditional divisions between the two domains narrowed in the 1990s amidst increases in international aid

Democracy is regarded as a worthy value by most Chinese people including the top leadership, yet in the last two decades, it seems that no progress has been made towards a democratic China. 1 The majority of Chinese people seem content with the current re

Rather than seeing technologies in oppositional terms, as either "empty" vessels to be filled by human intent, or powerful forces imbued with some kind of agency that no one can withstand, technologies are complex and continuously evolving manifestations

Indonesia's disasters - October's tsunami and eruption, the killing of suspected terrorists in Sumatra - get more media attention than its democratic elections. Yet these marked the direct re-election of the president last year and a cautious step away fr

Since the late 1980s, Northern Ireland has seen a radical electoral shift away from the historically dominant parties in the Catholic and Protestant blocs - the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), respectively - towa

In the face of police brutality, crackdowns on political parties and media, and a host of other violations ahead of Egypt's Nov. 28 parliamentary election, human rights advocates are calling on President Barack Obama to use U.S. leverage to persuade Egypt

The architecture of global governance that has emerged in the past two decades has been strongly influenced by transnational policy actors. This article examines the role of transnational corporate agency in social policy by focusing in particular on the

The Kremlin is embracing the Internet, heralding online participation as 'direct democracy.' This might seem like a progressive step for Russia. In reality, it's just a smokescreen - the guise of free society without real political process or representati

Scholars continue to grapple with the question of the relationship between economic development and democratization; prominent recent research has focused on the effects of economic inequality. Boix suggests that democratization is likelier when inequalit

This paper discusses the work of Noam Chomsky in the context of democracy, the media, and education. Through the analysis of selected works, a critical perspective emerges. This view demands that educators at all levels understand and confront the often d

Evidence from the Transitional Justice Data Base reveals which transitional justice mechanisms and combinations of mechanisms positively or negatively affect human rights and democracy. This article demonstrates that specific combinations of mechanisms-tr

This article attempts, for the first time, to link some central motives in the thought of Jürgen Habermas with the biographical experiences of the philosopher and social theorist. What are the relations which Habermas himself thematizes in his life story

The purpose of this paper is to bring class compromise back into the study of South Korean political economy and present it as a possible alternative to the overwhelmingly one-sided neoliberal trajectory in South Korea. The process and conditions under wh

The purpose of this article is to revisit Brown as a paradigmatic understanding of social justice and its barriers, by reconsidering Brown in light of the three moral pillars of democracy identified by Cornel West (2004). West maintains that authentic dee

In establishing an anarchic framework for understanding public space as a vision for radical democracy, this article proceeds as a theoretical inquiry into how an agonistic public space might become the basis of emancipation. Public space is presented as

Once, optimism abounded with the democratic project, particularly in the wake of Cold War collapse. Academics and policy-makers suggested that democracy was an inevitable spread of liberal ideals and institutions. Democratic change in South Korea since 19

The global financial crisis of 2009-2010 has further underscored the demise of social democracy as a legitimate political alternative, for example, due to an absence of a clearly articulated alternative approach to the crisis offered by Social Democratic

His viewpoints tend to elicit reactions of either dogmatic support or outright dismissal in Canada. Supporters view Cherry as a defender of "their game," and ultimately their country. Critics view him as a simplistic, loud-mouthed, and uninformed sport pe

The purpose of this article is to examine the authors' experiences while trying to enter and engage local communities in bottom-up literacies through participatory action research (PAR) toward the community's own collective self-development. In trying to enter five different communities, I have found several challenges and roadblocks such as mistrust of 'university people': legacy of the conventional outside-in and top-down research procedures for working in communities; power struggles with community 'gatekeepers', including 'building keepers'; and bureaucratized project-driven community work. I consider that under the current neoliberal educational policies that are plaguing the world, for example, No Child Left Behind in the USA, self-development projects promoted through PAR can be viable ways to defy these policies and their fatalist thinking. School children's parents and their communities are nowadays in a better position than teachers to fight for reclaiming local control of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment.

"The concept of "new social movements," characterized by a focus on identity, cannot readily be transferred to a Latin American context. Latin America never experienced the postmaterialist turn that led some to call certain European social movements "new." In addition, as the case of black organizing in Brazil demonstrates, identity-based Latin American social movements are much older than the literature suggests. What was indeed a Latin American novelty of the 1980s was the massive emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). In the case of Brazil, these organizations emerged in response to new financial opportunities provided by international donors and the coercive and paternalistic actions of states, a reality that the concept of new social movements is unable to capture. Both the long history of identity-based organizing and the emergence of NGOs can be explained by focusing on political opportunities and changing protest repertoires."