Category: Democracy and development

Women’s empowerment a rare bright spot in democracy landscape

     

  In a global democracy landscape marked by considerable gloom, progress in women’s political empowerment is a rare bright spots of recent years, argues the Carnegie Endowment’s Thomas Carothers a… Read more »

Is the U.S. giving up on supporting democracy abroad?

     

Serious pessimism about democracy’s global fortunes as well as skepticism about the value and wisdom of democracy promotion have gripped Washington, argues Thomas Carothers, vice president for studies at the… Read more »

Africa Experiencing ‘Democracy Fatigue’?

     

In the early 1990s, a wave of democracy swept the African continent, leading many observers to proclaim enthusiastically that the region was experiencing its “second independence,” analyst Mamadou Gazibo writes… Read more »

Beware the ‘Isolationist Temptation’

     

It has been only a quarter-century since the end of the Cold War, but the U.S. is already in the midst of its second great foreign-policy debate of the post-Soviet… Read more »

Reconfigure USAID for State-Building?

     

Washington’s top development agency needs to focus on building governments, not democracies, in chaotic foreign countries, according to Max Boot and Michael Miklaucic, respectively the Council on Foreign Relations’ Senior… Read more »

Mission Failure? America in the Post-Cold War Era

     

In the wake of the Cold War something unique in modern American history and rare in the historical experience of any great power occurred: The United States faced no serious… Read more »

What is the Arabic for democracy?

     

  The collapse of the post-colonial Arab system is, at its heart, a crisis of legitimacy. The impact of colonialism, often blamed by Arabs for their woes, should not be… Read more »

Why it’s wrong to say the Arab Spring failed

     

  Simply dismissing the uprisings [of the Arab Spring] as a failure does not capture how fully they have transformed every dimension of the region’s politics, argues Marc Lynch, a… Read more »

Is Democracy in Decline?

     

For all the commentary on democratic recession, there has been nothing like the kind of “reverse wave” that Samuel P. Huntington’s The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century… Read more »

Obama Doctrine – pendulum swung too far?

     

  For any believer in the trans-Atlantic alliance, liberal interventionism and the overall beneficence of American power, President Obama’s long exposition of his foreign policy to Jeffrey Goldberg in The… Read more »