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Through the informational activities of Africa’s civil society organisations, the new information communication technologies (ICTs) are largely perceived to offer unprecedented plurality that challenges the hitherto excessive powers and influence of the continent’s ruling elites. Before the advent of ICTs, many African leaders tightly controlled information dissemination ? allowing only the dominant political views. Based on interviews in Kenya and Zambia, this paper examines the perceptions that in Africa the impact of ICTs is, ironically, disproportionately greater than their overall spread, and that the libertarian ICTs as impetus to the third wave of democratisation shift the balance of power between states and citizens, especially in developing countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the words of human rights scholar David Forsythe, George H.W. Bush’s foreign policy incorporated “moral impulses as long as they did not prove inconvenient to expediential concerns,” (1995:126). In short, analysts have argued that human rights was approached pragmatically during the first Bush presidency, subordinated in realist fashion to broader strategic concerns and the considerations of post-Cold War power politics. But what of the son? By contrast, the presidency of George W. Bush has seemed to feature a shifting stance on the question of balancing human rights concerns and national security interests. As a candidate and in the first months of his presidency, George W. Bush largely echoed his father’s realist and pragmatic approach. For example, while committed to the promotion of political openness and economic growth abroad, on the question of humanitarian interventions, the initial position of the Bush team was to shun such operations unless larger regional or strategic interests were at stake. Yet by 2006 the Bush administration had embraced an apparent liberal interventionist stance toward the promotion of human rights, declaring in National Security Strategy 2006 that “… the United States seeks to extend freedom across the globe by leading an international effort to end tyranny and to promote effective democracy,” (2006:2). In this paper I will compare the approach to human rights and national security policy during the two Bush presidencies, identifying and accounting for key areas of similarity and difference. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a large pool of rigorous empirical studies investigating the relationship between ethnic heterogeneity and armed conflict. A general finding is that ethnicity matters, although not as much as portrayed in popular media. But a largely neglected aspect of these quantitative studies is how changes in the relative strength of groups affect conflict. Toft (2002) argues that differential growth may destabilize heterogeneous democracies internally. In democratic societies, political power is distributed according to popular support in elections. A changing balance between groups may thus alter the distribution of power and potentially lead to political instability and ultimately violent conflict. We argue that the relationship between differential growth and instability and violence may be even more important in semi-democracies with electoral systems, but with weak and inconsistent political institutions. In a cross-national time-series study we do a first empirical test of this notion. Starting from the premise that for differential growth to become a potential driver of conflict and instability, information of such change has to be recorded with a national census and actually published. Not yet having completed a reliable dataset on actual change between censuses, this paper investigates whether countries publishing identity data from consecutive censuses are at a greater risk of experiencing violence and political instability. Investigating the census data in two models of civil war and regime duration, we find no empirical support for the expectation that publishing identity data increases the risk of violent conflict and political instability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The overall topic of this paper is the relationship between regime type (e.g., democratic or authoritarian) and foreign policy orientation (i.e., relative proneness towards conflict and cooperation) for South America's Southern Cone. Its specific purpose is to offer an explanation of the relationship between regime type and foreign policy orientation in the 1970s. I will argue that, unlike what we would expect from a balance of power perspective, political regime is indeed crucial to understanding foreign policy orientation in the case under scrutiny. But I will suggest that changes in foreign policy orientation within the region in the last decade or so might owe more to the vanishing of authoritarian regimes than to the return of democratically elected leaders. However, I will not make universal claims about authoritarian regimes. I suggest, rather, that the pervasive influence that a geopolitically driven discourse of international politics had over the military establishments within the region is crucial to understand the relative conflict proneness of the authoritarian regimes that prevailed during the 1970's. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We reassess the pacific benefits of democracy, economic interdependence, and intergovernmental organizations while taking into account the influence of the dyadic balance of power, alliances, and other realist factors. Using data that have recently become available we are able to assess the importance of the Kantian and realist influences for the post-Cold War era through 2001. Our results show clearly that the liberal peace was not restricted to the bipolar years of East-West competition. As in previous research, the separate peace among democracies is consistently confirmed while the benefit of interdependence is supported in almost all tests. The effects of international organizations are most equivocal, but more research using better indicators of their ability to resolve disputes peacefully is clearly warranted. We also compare the explanatory power of the Kantian and realist factors to predictions regarding the importance of the hegemon and the clash of civilizations. We find no evidence that the power of the leading state is an important influence on the likelihood of dyadic conflict. Nor is the current war on Islamic terrorism a symptom of a general conflict between different civilizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil wars have several outcomes: government victory, rebel victory, truce or treaty. We use a measure of state capacity as a theoretical starting point to underpin hypotheses on the duration of these competing outcomes. This use of state capacity affords us a look beyond what merely ‘balance of power’ military capacity approaches can tell us. Looking at military capacity alone in a non-competing risks setting ignores possible outcomes such as a democratic state with a strong non-competing risks setting ignores possible outcomes such as a democratic state with a strong military foregoing military victory in favor of a treaty. We use multinational logit and competing risk survival analysis to explore the determinants of each outcome and its respective duration dynamics. Logit tells us what shapes the probability of each outcome and hazard analysis identifies the factors that determine the time to each outcome. We test the models for the years 1944 to 1997 using augmented data from Doyle and Sambanis (2000). The results indicate that the factors that shpae time to rebel victory also explain the the probability of that victory. State capacity (democracy, effective bureaucracy and army) decreases the probability of victory (by either side) and increases the probability of treaty. In addition, the intervention of the UN decreases the probability of both government and rebel victory, while increasing the likelihood of a treaty or truce. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Long quarantined by Cold War power politics and the dominance of realism, the spread of democracy has come to occupy a prominent role in the landscape of international politics in recent decades, which has led to a boom in democracy-related scholarship in IR. While acknowledging the many insights generated, there remains a troubling tendency for the discipline to engage with democracy in a superficial manner. It is argued that at the heart of IR's limited engagement with democracy is a simplistic reading of its past, which leads to a false sense of confidence about the possibilities of spreading it abroad, as well as a particularly weak normative defence of it. Simply put, in existing literature and practice we see liberalism at its most unreformed and doctrinaire. A more complex account needs to be constructed as a way of reconsidering democracy promotion, one more attuned to cultural difference and historical contingency. In contrast to the liberal account, the contextualist approach presented here focuses on the temporal and spatial limits of our conceptions of democracy, and what impact these have on the way we think about and seek to foster democracy. This alternative is one that may accord much less of a role for the active spread of democracy, but it allows for the possibility that where democratisation does occur, for it to be a much more genuine and localised event, and thus more likely to have a chance of succeeding. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The war on terror highlights the paradox that the state of emergency can function not as the exception but as the rule. This paper explores the political dynamics of paranoia. Drawing on Elias Cannetti and Eric Santer, I examine the contemporary emergence of what could be called the Paranoid State. In the Paranoid State the technology of surveillance turns the individual from an empowered soul into an observable object, voyeurism supplants intimacy, and secrecy and transparency replace knowledge and ignorance. In a Paranoid State the secrecy of the ruler increases disproportionate to the transparency of the ruled: the more secretive the ruler, the more the ruler also calls for unhindered transparency of the masses. The paper examines how a functioning democratic system functions to keep paranoia in check, and how the erosion of democratic checks and balances is accompanied by a culture of paranoia that intensifies what Santner terms a symbolic investiture crisis. This investiture crisis fundamentally alters the pragmatic and normative function of democracy and increases the danger of an apocalyptic politics of paranoia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper adopts the thesis that the ancient Greek orator and statesman Demosthenes formulated for the first time so clearly in western political and strategic thought two of the most important principles of International Relations theory and Foreign Policy analysis, the principles of balance of power and democratic peace. The contribution of Demosthenes has a special character because he tried to found ancient Athens’s foreign policy in a way which has a lot in common with the concept of international society (common interests, common virtues etc) of the English School of International Relations. Demosthenes was a premature grotian realist long before Grotius expressed his political philosophy of international society. So, this paper tries to enlighten the farthest origins of a tradition of thought or paradigm which dominates the theory of International Relations today and gives peace and international ethics an exceptional meaning against offensive realism and hegemonism, as they are appear in the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why do democracies sometimes select into tough fights? Why do they win some of these wars and lose others? In this paper, I begin to answer these questions. As has been widely noted, democracies are more likely than non-democracies to win their wars, especially those they initiate. Reiter and Stam credit this outcome to a "selection effect," whereby democracies are more likely than non-democracies to start wars that they can win quickly and decisively. On occasion, however, this "selection effect" breaks down. Specifically, the United Kingdom and the United States have selected into a number of wars where an easy victory was anything but assured. This follows from the fact that they are offshore balancers, charged with upholding the balance of power in critical regions when a potential hegemon threatens to overturn it. Despite the considerable risks they have incurred, the United Kingdom and the United States have ultimately prevailed in such wars when they have exploited the advantages that come from their geographical insularity. They have fared poorly when the nature of the conflict renders those advantages moot. The bulk of the paper develops these points theoretically. I reserve empirical testing for future work. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2003 Security Council deliberation over Res. 1441 have generated much discussion over the future of the balance of power, and the role of the security council in future debates over the ?handling? of rogue states. This paper examines the highly contentious diplomatic media leakage that most scholars have ignored in the interests of framing the council?s role according to traditional models of power and international norms. Finding much ?drift? away from traditional concerns over power politics and alliance breakdown, the author examines the offhand comments made to major media outlets by less powerful actors in the deliberations over issues of paternity, fraternity and good parenting. Drawing on Emily Apter?s examination of a post-colonial continental subject influenced more by techno-ideologies of futurism than of traditional categories of power and nationalism, this paper will highlight the one connection left to the brothers of democracy: their traffic in weapons and technology, and the role of what Derrida has called ?globalatinisation? in forging unity among brothers, and dissension in the ranks of the others. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In looking at the bilateral relationship between Russia and Georgia, neither systemic accounts on the balance of power nor domestic explanations about civilizations and governments can understand how and why both states experience one crisis after another ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Though balance of power and democratic peace theories have long been viewed as adversaries, I argue that the former is most likely to operate optimally, i.e. with fewer overreactions and miscalculations, when the international system is composed of well-functioning liberal democracies.What a liberal democracy is meant to do is to provide an aggregation of preferences filtered through constitutional checks, which best represents the interests of the collectivity as a whole. Existing liberal defenses of the theory are predicated on a normative understanding of the functioning of democracy which ignores its foundation in the classical liberal tradition. The purpose of liberal checks was to ensure that political outcomes were the result not of messianic, “altruistic” excesses of religious and other ideologies, nor of destructive passions of particularism, such as belligerent nationalism. Instead, they were meant to converge on a prudent policy that most affected would be willing to support, given adequate information. This is the kind of policy that defensive realists and neorealists have most consistently proposed: though the theoretical differences with liberal IR are deep, in practice, neorealists and liberals have found themselves on the same policy side where actual war, rather than lower level interventions, has been at issue (Vietnam, Iraq). A democracy that allowed defensive realists to shape policy would be more likely to behave as the theory predicts.To support the point, I construct a more “realist” understanding of the democratic process that has been offered in liberal accounts. Paradoxically, this allows me to show that existing realist critiques of DPT fail on their own terms. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discursive North-South dichotomy is even more obfuscating than the former East-West misnomer. It presents a mosaic world order comprised of fixated territorial unities, coherence within those containers and clear distinction from others of this kind. This glosses over frequent changes in border definitions, social entity (re)constructions and selective permeability of both. Monolithic classifications seem even more questionable since technological leapfrogging in transport and communication increasingly renders geographical proximity obsolete as source of shared interests, similar information and joint action. Genealogical or interpretive Transnational Historical Materialism analyses therefore decipher global relations as continuous struggles and conflicts between different human collectives that seek to secure their socio-economic reproduction. Coalitions transgress formal borders of identified entities and will develop according to the specifics of a concrete issue analyzed. Such analysis shows how collective wills seek to reproduce, stabilize and expand particular socio-economic orderings by turning them into general political programs. Processes towards compromise and securing of leadership are marked by logics of cooptation and intersubjective constitution of scales as structuring sites of political action. Just as nation states, international organizations are such scales, reproduced by genuine actor constellations whose decisions have transformative effects on the constellation of forces in global development. By the example of WTO negotiations it will be shown that neither territorial, nor formal classifications represent power plays in current international relations. The outlook briefly problematizes how modern liberal democracy ideals play an integral role in the extension of “Northern” hegemonic dominance. ..PAT.-Conference Proceeding [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]