BY SEAN W. BURGES One of the hot potatoes being passed around the policy branches of most major international development agencies is the question of what to do about the rising group of development actors who are not part of the exclusive club that meets in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Development Assistance [...]
BY BASSAM HADDAD I would like to start by positing two remarks about the recent events in the region. I use the word events deliberately to underscore the multitude of problematic and misleading ways in which the protests have been characterized, interpreted, connected, and written off by observers. Are these revolutions, or as Asef Bayat [...]
BY ERIC MCGLINCHEY Some efforts of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the former Soviet Union have proven more successful than others. Why do some assistance schemes pursued by USAID’s two central political party assistance implementers, the International Republican Institute (IRI) and the National Democratic Institute (NDI) yield positive results while other strategies [...]
BY JOHN N. PADEN Religious affiliation is one of many identities that may be mobilized for political purposes. Succession to leadership in democratic systems is always a political process, and symbol management is an integral part of this process. In pluralistic societies, the ability to balance the ticket, or to convince a multi-ethnic constituency that [...]
BY LISA JORDAN Global civil society is a relatively new layer of networks and organizations that operate beyond national borders. Over 20,000 of these networks are already active on the world stage, 90 % of which have been formed within the last thirty years. Many —including Jubilee 2000, the Global Campaign to Ban Landmines, Amnesty International [...]
BY DANIELE ARCHIBUGI The two main wars that opened the third millennium, those in Afghanistan and Iraq, have been justified by the United States (US) and its allies with a mixture of arguments. The first, and perhaps foremost, has been self-defense: to eradicate the terrorist roots in Afghanistan and destroy the alleged weapons of mass [...]
BY MARK N. KATZ Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, is clearly not a democrat. He has closed down independent television as well as other media outlets that have criticized him. He has not only waged a brutal campaign against separatists in Chechnya but has also rigged elections there. He has stripped away the assets of several [...]