Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Focusing on the examples of Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zaire, this text demonstrates how African rulers hold on to power while severed from foreign aid and subjected to collapsing economies and disappearing bureaucracies.

Warlord Politics and African States

The public sphere is the space of communication of ideas and projects that emerge from society and are addressed to the decision makers in the institutions of society. The global civil society is the organized expression of the values and interests of society. The relationships between government and civil society and their interaction via the public sphere define the polity of society. The process of globalization has shifted the debate from the national domain to the global debate, prompting the emergence of a global civil society and of ad hoc forms of global governance. Accordingly, the public sphere as the space of debate on public affairs has also shifted from the national to the global and is increasingly constructed around global communication networks. Public diplomacy, as the diplomacy of the public, not of the government, intervenes in this global public sphere, laying the ground for traditional forms of diplomacy to act beyond the strict negotiation of power relationships by building on shared...

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The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both comparative politics professors at Harvard University, have written a valuable, high-profile book that provides several useful insights into the current sta...

How Democracies Die

Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the era of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation, and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North–South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises, and the role of new configurati...

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Land Grabbing and Global Governance: Critical Perspectives

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages, Saskia Sassen, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, pp. xiv, 493. How to make sense of globalization? Saskia Sassen's attempt, in Territory, Authority, Rights (TAR), is like globalization itself: vast, sweeping and forceful, but maddeningly hard to grasp. At best, we are dazzled and sure we're on to something important. At worst, it's difficult to say what exactly this is. At times, we fear we've been had.

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages

In "The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile", Pablo Policzer tackles the difficult task of analyzing how authoritarian regimes utilize coercion. Even in relatively open societies, coercive institutions such as the police and military tend to be secretive and mistrustful of efforts by outsiders to oversee their operations. In more closed societies, secrecy is the norm, making coercion that much more difficult to observe and understand.Drawing on organization theory to develop a comparative typology of coercive regimes, Policzer analyzes the structures and mechanisms of coercion in general and then shifts his focus to the early part of the military dictatorship in Chile, which lasted from 1973 to 1990. Policzer's book sheds new light on a fundamental, yet little-examined, period during the Chilean dictatorship. Between 1977 and 1978, the governing junta in Chile quietly replaced the secret police organization known as the Direccion de Informaciones Nacional (DINA) with a different institution, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI). Policzer provides the first systematic account of why the DINA was created in the first place, how it became the most powerful repressive institution in the country, and why it was suddenly replaced with a different organization, one that carried out repression in a markedly more restrained manner.Policzer shows how the dictatorship's reorganization of its security forces intersected in surprising ways with efforts by human rights watchdogs to monitor and resist the regime's coercive practices. He concludes by comparing these struggles with how dictatorships in Argentina, East Germany, and South Africa organized coercion.

The rise and fall of repression in Chile

Latin America is one of the most violent regions in the world. It has suffered waves of repressive authoritarian rule, organized armed insurgency and civil war, violent protest, and ballooning rates of criminal violence. But is violence hard-wired into Latin America? This is a critical reassessment of the ways in which violence in Latin America is addressed and understood. Previous approaches have relied on structural perspectives, attributing the problem of violence to Latin America's colonial past or its conflictual contemporary politics. Bringing together scholars and practitioners, this volume argues that violence is often rooted more in contingent outcomes than in deeply embedded structures. Addressing topics ranging from the root sources of violence in Haiti to kidnapping in Colombia, from the role of property rights in patterns of violence to the challenges of peacebuilding, The Politics of Violence in Latin America is an essential step towards understanding the causes and contexts of violence-and changing the mechanisms that produce it.

The Politics of Violence in Latin America

Some of the most serious human rights violations today are not committed by states but by nonstate armed groups. A generation ago the international community barely paid attention to such violation...

Human Rights Violations Beyond the State

The Inter‐American Democratic Charter relies on the phrase “an unconstitutional alteration or interruption of a state's democratic order” as the central criterion for triggering the most powerful new set of diplomatic and political mechanisms for protecting democracy in Latin America. This article contends that identifying the constitutional status of even extreme subversions of the democratic order, such as a military coup, is not always straightforward. It shows that Latin American constitutions are often ambiguous and contradictory documents, which have provided the military with plenty of room for constitutional political involvement. The article concludes that a more robust regional mechanism for protecting democracy requires, as a starting point, a more pointed debate over the limits of non‐democratic practices, particularly by the military, permitted in Latin American constitutions.

Pablo Policzer

Papers

Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages

The rise and fall of repression in Chile

The Politics of Violence in Latin America

Human Rights Violations Beyond the State

The charter vs constitutional military involvement in politics