From self-reliant churches to self-governing communities: comparing the indigenization of Christianity and democracy in sub-Saharan Africa

Christian missionaries, especially from Anglo-American Protestant denominations, have been remarkably successful in their effort to plant ‘self-propagating, self-supporting, self-governing’ churches throughout the world and especially in sub-Saharan Africa. Today's international non-governmental organizations and inter-governmental organizations engaged in development, humanitarian assistance, peace-building and human rights resemble ‘secular missionaries’ spreading their gospel of democracy, good governance, peace, justice and sustainable development. This article investigates the extent to which today's secular missionaries might learn from the indigenization of Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. I conclude that an essential ingredient in the missionary strategy of evangelization is conspicuously absent in contemporary programmes of development, democratization, or peace-building. In particular, the extensive efforts devoted by Protestant missionaries to the translation of their Biblical message into local languages and symbolic repertoires bear little resemblance to efforts to transplant Western ideals of universal human rights or the institutional templates of democratic governance first developed in the United States and Western Europe.     

How democracy ends,by David Runciman

In 2006, Poland and Romania embarked on renewed lustration programmes. These late lustration policies expanded the scope and transparency measures associated with lustration as a form of transitional justice. While early lustration measures targeted political elites, late lustration policies include public and private sector positions, such as journalists, academics, business leaders, and others in ‘positions of public trust’. Given the legal controversy and moral complexity surrounding lustration, why lustrate so late in the post-communist transition and why expand the policies? The dominant explanation is that lustration is a tool of party politics and is a threat to democratic consolidation. However, the late lustration programmes do not fit this hypothesis neatly. The new laws have been restructured and packaged with other reform programmes, specifically anticorruption programmes. Late lustration has evolved to include economic and social, as well as political concerns. As such, some post-communist governments in Central and Eastern Europe appear to be trying to use lustration as a way to further the democratic transitions by addressing remaining public concerns about corruption, distrust, and inequality.     

Police demilitarisation: cops,soldiers and democracy

Arthur Costa is a PhD candidate at the University of Brasilia, Brazil. His forthcoming book is entitled Transição e Tutela: Militares e Políticos na Nova República. Mateus Medeiros was Co-ordinator of the Office for Human Rights of the City of Belo Horizonte and a lecturer in legal philosophy at the Federal University of Ouro Preto, Brazil. He is now a legislative analyst at the Human Rights Commission, Brazilian Chamber of Deputies.¹     

Making and Mobilizing Moderates: Rhetorical Strategy,Political Networks,and Counterterrorism

Studies of counterterrorism have argued for the importance of bolstering, or “mobilizing,” moderates in the confrontation with violent extremists. Yet the literature has not elucidated when states seek to mobilize moderates and marginalize extremists, how they do so, or when they prove successful. The received wisdom is that states should cultivate and strengthen moderate allies by reaching out to them. This approach, however, fails to grasp the political challenges confronting potential moderates, whose priority is to build and retain legitimacy within their political community. Inspired by network approaches, we maintain that moderates can more easily emerge when their political interactions with the authorities are relatively sparse. We further argue that the state's strategies, including crucially its rhetorical moves, can bolster the moderates' local legitimacy. At times, this will entail not reaching out to moderates but isolating them. Before moderates can be mobilized, they must be made, and the state's criticism, more than its love, may do much to help moderate political forces emerge. This article explains why mobilizing moderates is critical, when it is difficult, and how authorities can nevertheless play a productive role in moderates' emergence. We establish our theoretical framework's plausibility by examining two cases—India's ultimately triumphant campaign against Sikh extremists and Spain's gradual marginalization of Basque extremists. We then suggest what lessons these campaigns against ethnonational terrorism hold for the so-called War on Terror.     

Modernization,ethnic fractionalization,and democracy

In recent years, a number of studies have examined the relationship between ethnic fractionalization and democracy – so far with inconclusive results. We argue that the lacking robustness of existing findings is due to a theoretical and empirical misspecification of how ethnic fractionalization may influence the level of democracy. Ethnic fractionalization does have an impact on the regime form because it moderates the well-established positive effect of modernization on democracy. In other words, at low levels of ethnic fractionalization, modernization has a strong positive effect on democratization, but with increasing levels of ethnic fractionalization, the positive effect of modernization decreases. This relationship is documented empirically by using data on 167 countries since 1972.     

Transnational citizenship: problems of definition,culture and democracy

There is widespread disagreement over whether transnational citizenship provides defensible extensions of, or meaningful complements to, national citizenship. A significant strand of criticism relies upon empirical arguments about political motivation and the consequences of transnationalism. This paper addresses two questions arising from empirical arguments relating to the nation state and democracy. Do the alleged cultural requirements for effective political action provide an insuperable barrier to transnational citizenship? Does transnational citizenship necessarily require a commitment to transnational democracy? I argue that these largely empirical criticisms do not succeed in casting doubt upon the normative plausibility or practical viability of transnational projects. On the first question, I point to a growing transnational political culture that serves to motivate transnational citizens. On the second question, I argue for a legitimate category of transnational citizenship that, although inspired by cosmopolitan morality, is different from it, and that does not require transnational democracy.     

Law,interrupted: on legislative disruption and deliberative democracy

This commentary piece teases out a theme that runs through the articles collected in this special issue: the relationship between legislative disruption and deliberative democracy. The practice of legislative disruption appears to go against the normative aspirations of deliberative democracy, but our discussion identifies several respects in which this mode of engagement can function to reinstate a deliberative environment in certain contexts. Drawing on the articles in this special issue, our analysis also brings to the fore certain inadequacies in deliberative democracy as a framework for evaluating legislative disruption.