<p>This is an essay about the political development of Iraq after the overthrow of the Baath regime by the coalition forces in 2003. Almost seven years later, the political scene is still characterised by chaos, even though the country entered a new phase with the adoption of democratic thinking and a new openness to the world. The unstable political situation is a product of inter-ethnic conflict and the interference by neighbouring countries. Iraq is up against two formidable tasks – building democracy and building a nation. The essay sets out to explore the prospects of this dual mission.</p><p>The essay breaks down into three distinct, theoretically motivated parts or sections. The first part is inspired by O’Donnell & Schmitter’s transition theory and revolves around Iraq’s transition from dictatorship to democracy. The second part sets out to evaluate the development of democracy in Iraq after Saddam Hussein in the light of the seven institutional criteria of <em>polyarchies</em> as identified by Robert Dahl. The third part evaluates Iraq in terms of Arendt Lijphart’s groundbreaking theory about consensus as a pre-condition for democracy in highly divided societies.</p><p>The investigation confirms the general picture of the political situation in Iraq as unstable but with one notable exception – the Kurdish region. The constitution testifies to the ambition to turn Iraq into a polyarchy with strong elements of consensual democracy, but the spirit of the constitution is frequently violated by government institutions and individual politicians. The consensual features have in fact served as safety valve for the ethnic and religious minorities of Iraq; but it is an open question whether they will survive the onslaught by Prime Minister Al-Maliki, a recent convert to the Westminster model. The unclear relationship between Islam and democracy also looms large in the background in a country like Iraq and must somehow be resolved by the governing elite.</p>

The development of the news media in western societies coincided with the formation of a fully democratic polity based on universal suffrage, and from the outset the press and later broadcasting were assigned a central role in providing the information and argumentative resources for citizenship and in checking for abuses of power. But the commercial news media were also industries, increasingly financed by the sale of advertising, and commentators saw the search for audience maximisation moving news towards sensation. While these developments gathered momentum over many decades in the West, in Taiwan they have been compressed into two, as the country has experienced a rapid triple transformation: from authoritarian, single-party rule, to democratic politics based on multi party competition; from a state managed economy to a market-driven economy; and from a restricted media system to an open one marked by fierce competition. Many observers see this highly compressed process of change, coupled with the relative weakness of civil society, generating a particularly aggressive form of tabloidisation, a withdrawal from social responsibility and ethics, and news system ill adapted to serving the needs of a still consolidating democracy. This argument empirically through three detailed case studies of key stories places them in the context of the general changes reshaping Taiwanese news media and the original arguments over tabloidisation in the West, and concludes by exploring the possibilities for reform in the future.

Dependent Communities investigates the political situations in contemporary Cambodia and East Timor, where powerful international donors intervened following deadly civil conflicts. This comparative analysis critiques international policies that focus on rebuilding state institutions to accommodate the global market. In addition, it explores the dilemmas of politicians in Cambodia and East Timor who struggle to satisfy both wealthy foreign benefactors and constituents at home-groups whose interests frequently conflict.Hughes argues that the policies of Western aid organizations tend to stifle active political engagement by the citizens of countries that have been torn apart by war. The neoliberal ideology promulgated by United Nations administrations and other international NGOs advocates state sovereignty, but in fact "sovereignty" is too flimsy a foundation for effective modern democratic politics. The result is an oppressive peace that tends to rob survivors and former resistance fighters of their agency and aspirations for genuine postwar independence.In her study of these two cases, Hughes demonstrates that the clientelist strategies of Hun Sen, Cambodia's postwar leader, have created a shadow network of elites and their followers that has been comparatively effective in serving the country's villages, even though so often coercive and corrupt. East Timor's postwar leaders, on the other hand, have alienated voters by attempting to follow the guidelines of the donors closely and ignoring the immediate needs and voices of the people.Dependent Communities offers a searing analysis of contemporary international aid strategies based on the author's years of fieldwork in Cambodia and East Timor.

Commitment to a single, inclusive education system has been the aspiration of reform in education in a democratic South Africa. The dilemma facing the democratically elected government was to write educational policy which, when translated into practice, would improve the educational standards offered to students in impoverished schools while at the same time allow the maintenance of the high standards achieved in schools which had been privileged under the apartheid system. There was, furthermore, the challenge of providing a curriculum that would be meaningful to students from diverse backgrounds bearing in mind the socio-historical moment within which education found itself.Research on inclusive education in the developed world has been extensive. There has been less research completed in developing world countries. Situated in the Pietermaritzburg area of KwaZulu‐Natal (KZN), South Africa, a developing world country, participants in the current study were parents of children with disabilities, aide workers, regular and special educators, managers who made decisions affecting the education of these children, and the children themselves. The research is positioned in the theory of interpretivism which provided the opportunity to give a voice to the participants, to interpret how they made sense of their world. The methodology used was qualitative description with an evaluation component. Qualitative description allowed the discovery and understanding of "a phenomenon, a process, or the perspectives and worldviews of the people involved" (Merriam, 1998, p. 11). Data are presented so that the participants' point of view could be understood and made explicit (Artinian, 1988). Using qualitative description, this current study explored the beliefs about disability and inclusive education specifically of stakeholders in the education of disabled children. The evaluation component provided the means of ascertaining the extent to which disabled students were having their educational needs met, and the extent to which the policy ideals of inclusive education, as articulated in White Paper 6 (Department of Education, 2001), were being achieved.Inclusive education in this present study is viewed as a multifaceted construct which shares a reciprocal relationship with various theoretical determinants. The determinants considered in the present study are (a) concept of other, (b) disability discourse, (c) equity, (d) reconceptualist/incrementalist approaches to inclusive education, and (e) prerequisites for regular and special educator buy-in.Findings revealed that there was evidence of inclusive education beginning to be implemented in KZN in that barriers to learning for many students were being addressed and removed. The specific provision in policy documents directed towards children with disabilities was behind schedule, however, and there was little evidence of full inclusion of students with disabilities in regular education. Reasons for this were multiple and were explored in relation to criteria at a macro- and micro-level, distilled from the literature, which seem to be necessary for the successful inclusion of students with disabilities.The most significant macro-level factors were (i) the legacy of apartheid and the democratic process, moving towards a liberal democracy, still being in progress; (ii) the discourse around disability espoused by the majority of the population resulting in high levels of ostracism of the disabled; and (iii) the disabled becoming lost in the wide definition of need in the barriers to learning approach to inclusive education.The most significant micro-level factors were (i) regular educators being reluctant to embrace the inclusive education initiative because of problems they had encountered with another recent initiative, the implementation of Outcomes Based Education; (ii) special educators fearing for their students if they were to be included without the requisite preparation and support; and (iii) some parents lacking the efficacy to access education of any sort for their disabled children.These macro- and micro-level findings exist within a multifaceted array of factors, an intricate web of nuances and complexity.

The thesis examines the impacts of globalisation on the spheres of economy, politics and culture of the developing world, in the sense of understanding globalisation as interconnecting the civilisational, regulatory and spiritual human constructs into a global system. This scheme is extended to the environmental dimension as a reflection of the conflict between the global system created by man and the pre-existent and superior global system of the ecosphere. In each dimension, the aim is to identify the particular impacts of globalisation on developing countries considering the positive or negative influences on their situation and problems.

In this essay I will show the changes and continuity expressed in the official journal for the Swedish sports movement, Svensk Idrott. More precisely, the purpose of this essay is to investigate how the ideals of the Swedish sports movement changed or remained the same during the period 1929-1979. To further enable me to answer this my questions are as follows: What goals does the journal wish to achieve? Which groups and persons do they want to reach? How do they wish to work to achieve this? My material is the official journal for the Swedish sports movement Svensk Sport. It was a journal founded in 1929 with the expressed purpose of showing the work, goals and other aspects of Riksidrottsförbundet as well as to promote the sports movement. It eventually ended in 2013, but I have chosen to end my investigation of it in 1979 due to economic changes that caused the sports world as a whole to drastically change. My results are that due to economical and ideological changes related to commercialisation, amateuristic ideals and a democratic and feministic push within the larger people's movement changed Svensk Sport from a journal propagating amaturistic ideals with the man in focus to a journal propagating a sports for all people with less hostility to sports as a career choice.

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Cambodia underwent a triple transition in the 1990s: from war to peace, from communism to electoral democracy, and from command economy to free market. This book addresses the political economy of these transitions, examining how the much publicised international intervention to bring peace and democracy to Cambodia was subverted by the poverty of the Cambodian economy and by the state's manipulation of the move to the free market. This analysis of the material basis of obstacles to Cambodia's democratisation suggests that the long-established theoretical link between economy and democracy stands, even in the face of new strategies of international democracy promotion.

No / Mainstream health psychology supports neoliberal notions of health promotion in which self-management is central. The emphasis is on models that explain behaviour as individually driven and cognitively motivated, with health beliefs framed as the favoured mechanisms to target in order to bring about change to improve health. Utilising understandings exemplified in critical health psychology, we take a more socially situated approach, focusing on practicing health, the rhetoric of modernisation in UK health care and moves toward democratisation. While recognising that within these new ways of working there are opportunities for empowerment and user-led health care, there are other implications. How these changes link to simplistic cognitive behavioural ideologies of health promotion and rational decision-making is explored. Utilising two different empirical studies, this article highlights how self-management and expected compliance with governmental authority in relation to health practices position not only communities that experience multiple disadvantage but also more seemingly privileged social actors. The article presents a challenge to self-management and informed choice, in which the importance of navigational networks is evident. Because health care can become remote and inaccessible to certain sections of the community, yet pervasive and deterministic for others, we need multiple levels of analysis and different forms of action.

The thesis shed light into the connectivity between the Organization and Employees in terms of their acceptance and contribution towards Digital Transformation initiatives through the different elements of Data Democratisation. The study identifies Six key elements of Data Democratisation and how these elements are incorporated to successfully steer Digital Transformation in the organization. The six elements are Data Governance, Data Accessibility, Data Literacy, Data Culture, Data Security and Technology. A combination of Surveys and Literature Review are used to build a foundation for the research. The Democratised tools, Google Forms, Google Analytics and Power-BI are the data analysis methodologies to populate the study results. The results contribute to the organisations, seeking to optimize their Digital Transformation initiatives through Data-Driven methods over traditional Information Technology.   Keywords: Data Democratisation, Digital Transformation, Data Democratization, Elements of Data Democratisation.