McDonaldisation of Sovereignty: A Foucauldian Analysis of Responsibility to Protect

The importance of the principle of Responsibility to Protect (RtoP) has typically been attributed either to its character as a presumed new norm (normative ontology) or to its capacity to influence international politics by mobilising political actors to protect civilians through military interventions and other forms of intervention (causal ontology), as witnessed in the recent cases of Libya and Côte d'Ivoire. This article will argue for an additional model of explanation, according to which the main significance of RtoP might best be understood by reference to its character as a political statement of global policy networks (discursive ontology) calling for the reinterpretation of the sovereignty regime. The article will apply Michel Foucault's theory of discursive fields to demonstrate that RtoP beneficially introduces human security as an additional criterion of state sovereignty, thus contributing to the “humanitarisation of sovereignty”. However, RtoP also engenders “McDonaldisation of sovereignty” and “sovereignty-consumption” mentality in that it attempts to transform and homogenise pluralistic state sovereigns into a universal, seemingly humanitarian mould. As a drawback, this McDonaldisation process excludes some victimised groups from the remit of international concern.     

Trade and Democracy: A Factor-Based Approach

We study the relationship between trade openness and democracy using a data set with capital-labor ratios, trade flows, and regime type for 142 countries between 1960 and 2007. We are among the first to test a prediction that emerges from the model of Acemoglu and Robinson (2006): Relative factor endowments determine whether trade promotes democracy or not. The statistical results from two-stage least squares estimation indicate that trade is positively associated with democracy among labor-abundant countries but that trade has a negative effect on democracy in capital-abundant countries. The results are not robust, however, and thus we conclude that the evidence in support of their argument is relatively weak.     

对拉美民主的解析--读《拉丁美洲的民主:公民民主的未来》

20多年前拉美民主化进程启动时,拉美精英阶层、普通民众以及国际社会都对拉美民主化发展充满期待。然而,进入新千年以来,拉美民主化进程正面临着前所未有的危机,拉美国家已有多位总统迫于民众压力提前卸任;一些国家的选举投票率下降,民众示威抗议等活动时有发生。2004年4月,联合国开发计划署发表了由专家学者完成的关于拉美18国民主现状的报告《拉丁美洲的民主:公民民主的未来》(UNDP,DemocracyinLatinAmerica:TowardsaCitizens’Democracy,Argentina,2004)。这份理论与事实并重的报告对拉美民主问题进行了独到的解析,为深入了解拉美民…     

The Practice of Deliberative Democracy: A Study of 16 Deliberative Organizations

This article investigates 16 organizations that attempt to foster better public deliberation in local and national communities. It develops a typology of these organizations and discusses them in the context of the scholarly literature on deliberative democracy. It particularly focuses upon the contributions these organizations may make to debates within the literature between advocates of relational and rational modes of deliberation. It finds that, much like the literature, practitioners of deliberative democracy wrestle with the competing demands of inclusiveness and group cohesion. Organizations attempt to solve this dilemma by stressing group action. However, this emphasis on action raises another dilemma associated with the relation between deliberative and representative models of politics. The essay concludes by suggesting that these organizations have accepted the challenge of improving public life through discourse that has been laid down by deliberative democratic theory. As such, they represent a natural experiment in deliberative democracy that deserves the serious attention of the scholarly community.     

Democracy and civil war: A note on the democratic peace proposition

Democracies may not fight each other, but do they fight themselves? Despite the need to better understand internal wars, empirical investigations of the democratic peace have focused on international war between democracies. We test the effect of regime type on civil wars, a class of events that is widely overlooked in the study of conflict. We find that regime type strongly affects civil war participation.     

主权民主:普京对俄罗斯民主理论与实践的探索

普京执政以后,主张在加强国家权威主义的基础上发展符合俄罗斯国情的民主政治。普京的“主权民主”思想,既是维护俄国家政治、经济、军事权益的现实需要,也是为保证后普京时代俄国家政治体制得以继承与发展的一项战略举措。     

Democracy in China: a distant dream

Since the late 1970s, China has made enormous efforts to liberalize its markets and integrate itself into the world economy. Yet these developments have not been accompanied by any meaningful degree of liberalization of the political system. This paper attempts to account for the lack of democratization in China. In particular, it reviews the process of gradual economic liberalization initiated under Deng Xiao Ping and discusses the issue of corruption. Economic liberalization, it is shown, has provided new opportunities for the political elite to translate power into wealth, thereby making it more reluctant than ever to relax its grip on power. In a system of “autocratic capitalism,” the ruling elite both in business and government lack the incentives to introduce political liberalization. At this stage, dreams that the country’s economic liberalization will someday lead to democracy remain distant.

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Critical Commentary: The Assumptions of Democracy

The United States' project of democratisation in the Arab and Muslim world relies upon three core assumptions, revealed in Andrew S Natsios's account: the moderating power of democracy, a relationship between the nature of government and the condition of fear, and the tenacity of the US government in promoting democratic values in the region. Using the account of Iraq in Ambassador Edward Chaplin's article, this commentary seeks to show how each of these assumptions is contestable, and the likely consequences for the politics of the region if they do not conform to US expectations.     

湄公河上的民主曙光

柬埔寨地方选举平静完成 2月的湄公河失去了雨季的喧嚣,从柬埔寨的北部南下,在柬埔寨首都金边前面转弯后,静静地流向大海.和不少国际媒体的担心正好相反,2月3日柬埔寨举行的地方选举投票,是在没有暴力和威胁的平静情况下进行的,除了柴桢省有两个乡因为选票送错地方,需要延期选举外,没有其他异常情况的报告.     

非洲民主化：外因与内因

影响非洲民主化的因素可以概括为外部和内部两个方面。冷战结束为非洲民主化提供了一个契机,苏联的解体、美国和法国对非洲政策的改变是促使非洲政治改革的外部因素。但与国际环境的改变相比,非洲国家内部人民要求改革的呼声和为此而采取的实际行动则是非洲民主化发展的决定性因素。内外部因素相互作用使有些非洲国家的政治改革走向成功,但有的却没有成功。     

Mauritania: Political Parties,Neo-patrimonialism and Democracy

This article takes issue with those analyses of ‘developmental democracy’ which treat popular participation as a clamorous inconvenience to be managed in the interests of economic efficiency. Instead it asks what follows from prioritizing participation both as a defining feature of democracy, and as an integral part of what is meant by development.

The analysis is developed in two parts. The first contrasts the narratives of popular and of liberal democracy, showing how they come to different conclusions about participation and its role in development. But it also argues there are potential complementarities. These were obscured when socialist ‘people's democracies’ were (misleadingly) seen as popular alternatives to liberal democracy. Since the end of the cold war, however, the focus has been on democratizing liberal democracy, to ensure it is responsive to the needs of citizens, as active participants in development and not just targets of state policy, rather than on whole system alternatives.

The second part reviews the experience of popular democratic experiments in Tanzania and Nicaragua, which sought to extend participation beyond the confines of representative democracy, and to link it to participatory development. It might be read as a requiem for their apparent failure. But their vicissitudes also raise broader questions: about the contradictions between popular participation and ‘people's democracy'as a system of rule; concerning the structures and procedures (elections, political parties, civil society bodies, mass organizations and so on) through which participation is organised; and about the problems of harmonizing participatory development with the management of complex national economies.     

Democracy in Latin America: Problems and prospects

This essay examines, by way of a series of brief country sketches, the current state of democratization in Latin America. It argues that in the formal sense progress has been significant but that only in a handful of countries has the economic development which democracy requires taken place. Many serious impediments (corruption, party weaknesses, public alienation, and poor policy implementation among them) remain. It will be decades before a definitive judgement can be reached.     

Promoting Democracy after Conflict: The Difficult Choices

This article examines the democratic reconstruction model advocated by western countries for postconflict societies. It finds that the model has not been implemented successfully, in part because of a lack of international political will and financial resources, in part because the model has grown too complex. As the international community learned from successive experiences with postconflict reconstruction, the model grew in sophistication and complexity. While this is good in theory, in practice it widens the gap between the ideal and what can actually be accomplished with limited international resources and weak local governments. Even in Bosnia, where international commitment has been large, this maximalist approach to state reconstruction has met with only limited success. The international community must rethink its approach to postconflict reconstruction and scale it down to something that can realistically be achieved.