Read all posts for ‘democracy’

Our world is more democratic than ever. Proving the post-Cold War mass democratization to be a historical rather than circumstantial development, the proliferation of democratic regimes has continued to the present day. Look at the Arab Spring, Egypt, and the unrest that continues to unnerve non-democratic regimes in countries such […]

An economy is, in many ways, like a forest. It is constructed by opposing and necessary forces that together strengthen the whole. Without the destructive, the constructive would cease to exist. Without fire, the forest would choke on its own excess. Without economic downturn and job loss, so would an economy.

The Arab Spring uprisings have triggered notable shifts throughout republican Arab states. The story in the Gulf monarchies, however, is starkly different. The Gulf Monarchies are, for the most part, autocratic, hydrocarbon-rich states whose regimes derive legitimacy from tradition and an inflated ability to pacify populations through the distribution of […]

On January 18, 2006, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice announced a new foreign policy called transformational diplomacy. Challenging old assumptions that the domestic character of other countries did not matter for foreign affairs or American security, Rice argued that: [The United States must] work with our many partners around the world, […]

If we talk about the ways disasters impact on democracy and the ways democracies cope with them, we can see considerable variation from country to country, even though the impact of a disaster is always a testing case. In my view it’s not democracy but a functioning system that helps […]