The fragile consensus among much of the international community toward pushing for national elections in Haiti this calendar year is not matched by the political reality on the ground.
Category Archive: Latin America
By Georges A. Fauriol
The past decade has convincingly brought to a close a period of global democratic growth and consolidation underway since the late 1970s – Samuel Huntington’s “third wave.” We have instead now witnessed twelve years of democratic decline. This is fueled by the resurgence of expansionist authoritarianism armed with a vision strategically eager to compete with the norms and institutions of democracy; worse, there is also a measurable decline by established democracies in their commitment to democratic governing principles – in the aggregate, this is Larry Diamond’s “democratic recession.”
By Manuel Ayulo, Master’s Candidate of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown University.
Why the Corporate Sector?
Corporate investment in global development activities has steadily increased for over a decade. According to a study in 2014, most development experts expect corporate global development to triple by 2025 while bilateral aid shrinks by 30 percent.[i] Given these market trends, it is not surprising that development agencies like USAID increasingly consider private sector engagement and investment as cornerstones of their development strategies.
By Manuel J. Ayulo, second year student of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown University
Citing the philosopher W.B. Gallie, Collier and Levitsky remained us that democracy is “the appraisive political concept par excellence”.[1] They are right. In Latin America, democracy continues to be a contested concept. Although the vast majority of the countries are not considered authoritarian, that doesn’t imply that they share or value a homogenous concept of democracy.
By Sundar Ramanujam, alumni of the Democracy and Governance Program at Georgetown University
In the classic essay that he wrote on the challenges of transition theory for Philippe Schmitter & Guillermo O’Donnell’s Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, Przeworski presents a rational-choice driven framework to explain the mechanics of democracy [1].
democracyandsociety.net 