Democracy and Citizenship

Previous studies have noted the dominance of official sources within the news process and their unique ability to shape media narratives. This research addresses the role and implications of news sources in contributing to the overwhelmingly positive portrayal of the anti-Mubarak opposition protesters within British and American newspaper coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution. Furthermore, this paper will assess how the position of global political elites towards the protests in Egypt possibly opened up the editorial space within the news coverage of the revolution for the anti-Mubarak opposition movement to emerge as the dominant voice within the reporting.

The relationship between democracy and Islam is very complex, hence requires a rigorous scholarship to understand this complex interplay. The present paper examines the “success” as well as impediments in democratic consolidation in a Muslim majority state, Bangladesh. Through assessing electoral competitiveness, constitutional guarantees and implementation, women’s rights and political participation, and victory of secular party over Islamist, this paper considers Bangladesh as a “successful” Muslim democracy. Islam, this paper argues, is not a problem in democratization while there are a number of factors obstructing democratization in the Muslim majority states. To analyse the nexus between Islam and democracy, it is imperative to pay meticulous attention to explain the nature of the state and its social formation, origin, nature and practices of Islam in a particular society rather than just labelling Islam as incompatible with democracy. In the Muslim majority state like Bangladesh, as this paper argues, civil-military-bureaucratic structure leading to a symbiotic nexus between politicians, bureaucrats and military oligarchs, fragmentation, familialization and clienteistic party politics leading to neo-patrimonilism, lack of social capital and trust, and unequal distribution of economic and political resources are hindering democratic consolidation.

"Le nombre de plus en plus élevé de villes moyennes en Afrique nécessite de développer une analyse du phénomène urbain qui ne soit subordonnée ni à l’étude des métropoles ni à celle des communautés, lesquelles ont fait les beaux jours des études anthropologiques. Après être revenu sur l’histoire de la discipline, cet article esquisse les jalons d’une approche globale de la ville permettant d’étudier de manière comparative les centres secondaires.

An important feature of urbanization process in Africa is the proliferation of small and medium urban centers which constitute the major part of the urban population today. However in the literature these towns remain often in the shadow of studies devoted to the analysis of metropolis or small communities in the city. After a retrospective of urban anthropology’s history, this paper outlines a global approach able to grasp secondary cities in a comparative perspective."

Pour analyser les évènements sociaux connus en Tunisie depuis 2010, il faut employer une approche phénoménologique  de  l’espace  public  en  tant  que  scène  où  les  acteurs  accèdent  à  la  visibilité  publique et agissent d’une façon déterminée. Bien que les dirigeants politiques autoritaires aient tenté de s’emparer de l’espace public, depuis 2010, les citoyens tunisiens ont lancé une révolution – qui s’est déroulée en plusieurs étapes – dont l’objectif  est un changement social qui n’aurait aucun sens sans cette réappropriation de l’espace public. Par les manifestations, les immolations, les graffitis, les sit-in, la danse ou les slogans écrits sur leurs corps, les citoyens tunisiens cherchent à exprimer leurs aspirations sociales ainsi que leur volonté de redéfinir les normes publiques en créant un dialogue à même de redessiner les frontières morales de la communauté nationale.

The relationship of public space to democracy is dominated by two competing, yet intertwined, theoretical bases: political philosophy and spatial theory. But how does the architect make political space? Can architectural practice create political space through design? In this book, Teresa Hoskyns theorizes that the converging point between theoretical foundations and democratic practices is “participation” within “social production of space.” Therefore, “participation” from joint perspectives of architecture and political philosophy has been studied in two different frameworks: the theoretical and the practical. Unlike most previous works on the relationship between architecture and democracy, Hoskyn’s book transcends the spatial and political interpretation of public space. By incorporating new theoretical approaches to representative democracy, it depicts a complex dialectic and multilayered picture of—“spaces of democracy” and the “democracy of space”—in her phrasing.

This paper investigates how British and American newspaper coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution framed the protest movement that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak as the President of Egypt. Previous studies examining Western media coverage of domestic protests indicate that news media often covered movements and protesters with the expectation of violence occurring, or whose motivations, aspirations, and actions were trivialised and marginalised, while Western media coverage of the Middle East and North Africa often contextualised the region's nations, peoples, and politics in ways that promoted negative stereotypes. In analysing British and American newspaper coverage of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution, this paper demonstrates the opposite to be true through a content and framing analysis of relevant news stories (n=611). Results from British and American newspaper samples offer strong evidence for not only reassessing the dominance of the reportorial paradigms by which the news media covers political and social dissent, but also normative Western media portrayals of the nations and people within Middle East and North Africa.

In this chapter, first, I will explore key ways in which elements of contemporary innovative conceptions of democracy – deliberative, ‘difference’, cosmopolitan, ecological and others - seek to reconstruct and reconstrue citizens and citizenship (and often disagree with each other in the process, within and across these categories of innovation). I shall do this by pinpointing some key ways in which these innovations seek to expand the domains of democratic citizenship by reconfiguring (1) where we find citizens, (2) how they are construed, and (3) what expectations are held of them.  Secondly, I try to respond to the challenges posed by innovative theories, by showing how the core notions of political representation and democracy itself need to be reconfigured in order to enable us to apply them meaningfully, and to continue the recommendatory tasks of political theory, in an era of scepticism, rapid political change and social complexity.

Many culturally heterogeneous societies with functioning democratic regimes nonetheless fail to grant equal status to different ethnic and cultural groups within their borders. To a great extent, scholars discuss such inequalities within the analytical boundaries of the discourse on democracy and democratization. We argue that such discussions overstretch the concept of democracy. In this research, we offer a novel axis of inquiry, namely distributiveness. We define distributiveness as the egalitarian distribution of resources – political, material, cultural-symbolic, institutional, and territorial – among different ethnic, religious, or cultural groups which self-identify as collectives within society. The aim of this new conceptualization is to (1) restore conceptual clarity to the literature on democracy, (2) enhance our capacity to assess the allocation of resources within a given polity, and (3) elucidate the processes that lead to change in patterns of allocation.

Megan M. Peloso & Leila M. Harris (2017) Pathways for Participatory Water Governance in Ashaiman, Ghana: Learning from Institutional Bricolage and Hydrosocial Perspectives, Society & Natural Resources, 30:12, 1491-1506, DOI: 10.1080/08941920.2017.1364451 Coupling a hydrosocial perspective with institutional bricolage, this research considers possibilities for participatory water governance in Ashaiman, a peri-urban settlement of Accra, Ghana. We explore three questions: (1) How do people in Ashaiman evoke ideas or experiences of water in general and water governance in particular? (2) What possibilities currently exist for engaging the community in key water-related decisions? (3) What possibilities exist for enhanced participatory water governance in this context, including potential for and interest in new institutions and engagement processes? Results of qualitative interviews and semistructured observation suggest that a siloed, water-centric approach inadequately captures every...

Is it now the moment of truth? The crucial moment? Is the crisis, whose cronos stretches back for almost a decade now, the qualitative time to take a stand? The time is now, we tell ourselves. Maybe the time is now, but perhaps this has always been the case. The crucial moment to express a concern, a feeling or e thought. But isn’t there kairos even when there is no crisis? Isn’t every historic moment a decisive point in the future of mankind? Isn’t there always a crisis? Isn’t there always conflict, and hasn’t there always been? Is “now” now? When is “now”? We’re going through a historic moment of change, but haven’t they all been? Isn’t the world sensitive to perpetual change? Perhaps, like always, it’s just a matter of degree.

Um regime democrático per se não garante uma relação Estado-sociedade livre de desigualdade e possíveis violações de direitos fundamentais dos cidadãos. A identificação de um Estado como democrático ou não democrático é qualitativa e arbitrária, pois depende do estabelecimento de limites acerca do que se entende por democracia, bem como ”das condições dos vários direitos e instituições em países específicos” (DAHL, 2002, p. 166). O Estado de Israel é considerado a única democracia do Oriente Médio por grande parte da comunidade internacional. Entretanto, a situação no ambiente doméstico é bastante problemática e suscita dúvidas em relação a esse status, bem como à sua manutenção. A disputa pelo território e a ocupação militar das áreas destinadas a um Estado Palestino, desde a criação de Israel na Palestina (1948), resultaram em violações do direito internacional e dos direitos humanos de milhares de palestinos, incluindo palestinos cidadãos de Israel.

Many culturally heterogeneous societies with functioning democratic regimes nonetheless fail to grant equal status to different ethnic and cultural groups within their borders. To a great extent, scholars discuss such inequalities within the analytical boundaries of the discourse on democracy and democratization. We argue that such discussions overstretch the concept of democracy. In this research, we offer a novel
axis of inquiry, namely distributiveness. We define distributiveness as the egalitarian distribution of resources – political, material, cultural-symbolic, institutional, and territorial – among different ethnic, religious, or cultural groups which self-identify as collectives within society. The aim of this new conceptualization is to (1) restore conceptual clarity to the literature on democracy, (2) enhance our capacity to assess the
allocation of resources within a given polity, and (3) elucidate the processes that lead to change in patterns of allocation.

Enfranchising emigrants implicitly involves inviting them to have a voice and increasing engagement in home politics, thus maintaining active membership of their nation of origin. However, in the Latin American Southern Cone (as well as in several other countries in the region), both state policies and expats’ responses have fallen short of making that invitation effective. What explains this inclusion paradox? Why, while franchise is expanding has effective political inclusion of citizens living abroad not materialized? This article addresses these questions for the cases of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. Conclusions highlight relatively unexplored explanatory factors and enhance our understanding of the links between migration policy innovation and political inclusion beyond borders in some of the least studied cases in the literature.

"This series of policy briefs provides a regular update of debates concerning key rights issues in three Arab states, Morocco, Egypt and Tunisia. In a first round of briefs on the three countries, we provide background on these debates since the beginning of the Arab spring.
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About the Project:
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