One of the most common features found within peace agreements are provisions that call for post-civil war elections. Unfortunately, recent research on post-civil war stability has consistently demonstrated that the initial elections held after civil wars significantly increases the risk for renewed fighting. While this research does highlight a danger posed by post-war elections, it focuses only on one element associated with post-civil war democracy. I argue that by implementing electoral reforms that are called for in peace agreements, post-war countries reduce the risk of renewed civil war. Implementing these peace agreement provisions increases the durability of post-war peace in two ways. First, by implementing costly electoral reforms called for in the peace agreement, the government signals a credible commitment to the peace process which reduces security dilemmas faced by opposition groups. Second, electoral reforms generate new avenues for political participation for disaffected citizens, which reduces the ability of hardliners to mobilize future armed opposition. I examine how implementing post-war electoral reforms impact the risk of renewed conflict from 1989 through 2010. Using duration models, I demonstrate that implementing these electoral reforms substantially reduces the risk of renewed conflict.

Masters in Management: Finance and Investment, Wits Business School / Since the early 1990s an increasing number of countries are adopting inflation targeting and although it has been lauded as a successful monetary policy regime this paper seeks to determine whether or not inflation targeting is sufficient to bring about financial market stability. We compare 10 emerging market economies, 6 that have adopted inflation targeting and 4 that have not in order to ascertain whether or not there is a significant difference between these groups of countries based on 2 financial market stability indicators, the first being the volatility of equity markets and the second being currency volatility. From these results, there is no evidence that inflation targeting has had any impact on the stability of financial markets and in some instances, non-targeters have outperformed targeters in terms of the improvements in stability

Thesis advisor: ALI BANUAZIZI / How can one think of the possibility of emergence of democracy in non-Western countries? Such an idea had been approached in pessimism for a long time in academia. This is because the conditions deemed indispensable for democratic development (such as high rates of urbanization and literacy) rarely existed in those countries. Thus, the concept “Western democracy” was considered an oxymoron, since, according to earlier scholars of democracy, only Western polities could meet the conditions/prerequisites for the genesis of democracy. Nevertheless, this long-held prophecy was challenged as non-Western countries demonstrated significant progress towards establishing a democratic rule, despite having “so-called” unfavorable conditions (such as religion or poor economic performance) to democratic development. Despite this global resurgence of democratic governance, the countries in the Middle East and North Africa were never able to develop a democratic rule, a situation that has long been explained by pointing at the “exceptional” characteristics (primarily Islam) inherent in the region. Yet, the events that began on December 17, 2010 in Tunisia opened up the possibility for the countries that had been long-ruled by autocrats to embark on a democratic transition. The uprisings that eventually unseated longtime authoritarian rulers (only occurred in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, and Libya) enabled divergent socio-political forces to become involved in transitional processes in the aftermath of regime breakdowns. However, only the first two cases had meaningful steps that were taken towards sustaining the transition. This research has been built on the argument that four key factors have played important roles in transitional processes of these two cases, namely Tunisia (the transition to a democratic governance) and Egypt (the restoration of a new form of authoritarianism): the formation of the state, pact-making compromises among revolutionary actors, moderation of religious parties, and civil society activism. In addition to explaining the divergence in these two countries’ transitional processes, this research has been written in response to the prolonged pessimism that the regimes in the region are destined to stay non-democratic. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2017. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Middle Eastern Studies.

CHARLES UNIVERSITY IN PRAGUE FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES Bibliographical Registration Form Master thesis in the programme I E P S 1. Given name and SURNAME of the author: Mazhar Hassan Bari 2. Title of the Thesis: The Challenges and Prospects of Democratisation in the Muslim world: The case of Pakistan 3. Subordinate title: 4. Year of defence: 2019 5. Number of pages: 64 6. Summary of the Thesis (extended abstract): Debate on the compatibility of Islam with democracy has gained momentum between academic circles in the recent years often in the context of a "clash" between Western and Islamic civilization. The main objective of this thesis is to contribute to this debate by trying to identify main challenges and prospects of democratization in the Muslim world. The theoretical framework of this thesis will be based on modernist and reformist theories of Islamic political thought. The concepts of Ijtihad (independent reasoning) and Ijma (consensus or agreement) will be applied in order to answer key questions research "Are the key principles of Islam compatible with core values of democracy?" or "Is Islam inherently authoritarian?". The theoretical outcomes will be applied on the case study of Pakistan, country that has just achieved another significant democratic transition of power through general elections....

The animating goal of this dissertation is to reclaim John Dewey’s philosophy to present a case against the minimalist and elite assumptions that I identify in both legal theory and democratic theories today. The aim is to present a framework for rethinking the relationship between the normative value of legal processes and the nature of law itself, and to defend Dewey’s turn to a robust participatory democracy as a moral ideal and “a way of life.” The specific goals are twofold. Firstly, I offer a critical reading of core concepts in jurisprudence on the concept of law and the source of law’s normativity, especially in the works of John Austin and H.L.A. Hart. I argue that a basic thread links the works of John Austin and H.L. A Hart, as well as Richard Posner today, and champions of elite democracy generally: a descriptive and normative claim that the general public does not have the capacity to understand and actively participate in complex legal processes. As these accounts argue, our general treatment of laws – and, for Austin and Posner, our commitment to democracy and popular sovereignty – should not assume a constitutive role for the public. I present this reading by reconstructing and expanding on arguments from Dewey’s critique of Austin and the prevailing legal theories in his day, in Chapter 1, and through a pragmatic reading of Lon Fuller’s critique of Hart, in Chapter 4. I argue that Austin and Hart’s theories have themselves been buttressed by anti-democratic claims about the epistemic competence of the public and their (lack of) ability and desire to engage in the complex processes of will formation. These understandings of law have, in turn, led to the mainstreaming of critiques – like that of Henry Maine – that robust participatory democracies are modern chimeras. The best we can hope for in a democracy is a check on the activities of officials. In short, the cycle is vicious: conceptions of law and critiques of democracy have been developed in lockstep based on a basic questioning of the public’s willingness and ability to shape and understand legal and political processes. The aim of this dissertation is to suggest, with a re-reading of Dewey’s philosophy, how we may begin to break this cycle, by rethinking core concepts of law, and of democracy’s relationship to law. To that end, I offer a reconstruction of a Deweyan philosophy of law to reconsider questions of the social sources of law and its relationship to robust participatory democracy. The second overarching aim of the dissertation is a reading and defense of Dewey’s ethical conception of democracy. This reading of Dewey is grounded in Dewey’s commitment to providing the framework for securing values and “the full development of human beings as individuals” on equal and collaborative terms. Dewey developed his account in part against critics of participatory democracy, like Henry Maine and Walter Lippmann, who sought to deflate the definition of democracy as one form of government among others, differentiated only by the majoritarian principle in determining who rules. As I will demonstrate, Posner’s selective reading of features of Dewey’s theory of knowledge and inquiry, and his pragmatic philosophy more generally, allows him to see epistemological justifications of democracy as indefensible against empirical findings of low IQs and the demands and dreariness of political participation. Dewey’s experimentalism and ‘methods of intelligence’, which I discuss in Chapter 2 and 3 of this dissertation, provided philosophical warrant for a much more robust defense of democracy than Posner acknowledges.

This thesis reassesses the significance of the prominent journalist and political thinker Walter Lippmann within the intellectual history of American democracy in the early twentieth century. It argues that he shaped this history more distinctively and more contingently than the existing scholarship allows. Contesting the elitist vision of technocratic government associated with him by scholars since the 1980s, the thesis contends that he became influential because his democratic theory provided his contemporaries with a demanding account of political culture. By combining the conceptual resources of liberal constitutionalism with social psychology, Lippmann developed a particular kind of democratic theory, which explained opinion formation through the political dynamics of existing cultural environments, and which animated a particular mode of political thought in the early twentieth century. This mode made him into one of the leading theorists of American democracy in the 1910s and especially the 1920s. It also exposed him to sustained criticism during the economic and international crises of the 1930s and 1940s. At stake in this mode were the possibilities and difficulties of explaining politics in a modern democracy through cultural concepts.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Ohio University, June, 2006. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 223-241)

At the beginning of the 21st century the welfare state is under pressure from two sides. On the one hand, there is "globalisation", on the other hand seems to be some sort of normative crisis of the welfare state’s moral foundations. The welfare state is said to curtail individual freedom and autonomy. <br>This article rejects this assumption by exploring the philosophical and moral foundations of the welfare state, thereby demonstrating that it is essentially necessary for individual freedom and autonomy. Furthermore, it is shown that individual freedom is also the core principle of liberal democracy and that the welfare state is therefore an indispensable prerequisite for democracy itself.

The current study is aimed at investigating the puzzle of why FPI (Islamic Defenders' Front) has chosen to adopt violent strategies within the democratic context of Indonesia. Much of literature on social movements suggests that democracy is inherently nonviolent because it allows social movements to use a number of reasonable tactics to pursue their goals. On the contrary, authoritarianism is considered to be the cause of the emergence of violent movements. However, a violent movement is not necessarily absent in the context of democracy. Using the language of Islam, justice and democracy, FPI (Islamic Defender's Front) conspicuously committed at least 64 cases of violent collective actions from 1998 to 2010. Three levels of analysis are used in order to investigate this social puzzle, namely the level of organization, individual characters and FPI's violent actions. Combining these three levels of analysis, this study found that the making of the violent Islamist movement (FPI) is complex and interconnected. First, there are at least four social environments that have led FPI to the adoption of violent means. They are the historical context of Islamist movements in Indonesia (1945-1998), the timing of violence by FPI, social support for FPI's violent actions and low state capacity. Second, there are at least four factors that relate to individuals and organization of FPI. They are FPI's encounter with so-called justified violence, FPI's engagement in violence-prone activities, fundamentalism and FPI's framing of its violent actions. Combining these factors has made FPI's violence become more persistent in the new democratic context of Indonesia. Consequently, despite the fact that democracy inhibits political violence, democracy may also allow the use of violent means by social movements. In doing so, democracy opens an opportunity for people, especially elites, to support the cause of violence. Therefore, this can undermine the government's will to fully suppress the violent movement. In addition, there are other significant factors, other than state repression, that also facilitate violence, such as a movement's choice to engage in violence-prone activities, low state capacity, a good timing of violence (cultural resources) and a good framing of violence.

This dissertation examines how the three western Allies used sport to rebuild western Germany during the occupation and early years of the Federal Republic. The Allies believed that the sports in which Germans chose to participate before 1945, in particular fencing and gymnastics (Turnen), helped define ones Germanness through demonstrations of militarism and hyper-masculinity. The development of Directive 23 on the Limitation and Demilitarization of Sport within the quadripartite Allied Control Authority imposed on sport the goals of the Potsdam Declaration: denazification, demilitarisation, decentralisation, and democratisation. By using sport as a vehicle to examine the achievement of western Allied goals, this dissertation demonstrates the centrality of sport to occupation policy. Sport became a highly effective instrument of public diplomacy because of its broad appeal and also because it allows for a public display of national capabilities. By encouraging competition with athletes from other countries, the western Allies fostered a transformation of German sport from defining individual characteristics to supporting broader, group-oriented ideas of democracy. The problems of creating national sport organisations mirrored the geo-political situation as the western occupation zones merged to form the Federal Republic. The debate over the structural organisation of sport provided the Germans with an opportunity to demonstrate the democratic ideals learned from the western Allies but also allowed them to use these same ideals to gain autonomy. Germans used the internationalism of sport to regain a position within the international community because international sport federations lay outside official state control. Examining unofficial international football matches and West Germanys reacceptance by the international federations illustrates how sport provided a place for Germans to participate in the international system when no formal German state existed. The division of Germany forced the worlds sportsmen to address the political realities of Germany even though they considered sport separate from politics. This dissertation demonstrates how the western Allied efforts to dissociate sport and politics instead created the environment which enabled sport to assume a place of primacy during the Cold War, making the use of sport to democratise West Germany an ironic continuation of the politicisation of sport within Germany. / PhD