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The recent protest in the city of Hong Kong from the viewpoint of Valentina Mazzucato

During the EADI 14th General Conference panel session ‘Promoting Democracy in a Polycentric World: What Role for the Emerging Powers’, Andrew Cooper and Gerd Schönwälder argued that the emerging economies - mainly Brazil, India, South Africa, Turk...

How the European Union is slowly disintegrating through a lack of democracy.

Latin American societies and states formed around the disputes about control over natural resources, as Bolivian intellectual Rene Zavaleta highlighted. In Bolivia, from the 16th to the 19th century, the exploitation of silver in Potosí and the ex...

The High-Level Panel's targets on ensuring good governance and effective institutions need to be further specified.

Mandela was an ethical realist, who rejected confrontation both at home and internationally.

Turkey needs to address human rights and inequality to be a role model for emerging powers.

Trade unions are crucial in transforming the economy since they fight for the democratic inclusion of all participants.

The economic crisis is being handled in a way that benefits a small and wealthy group of technocratic European politicians, investors and entrepreneurs. It therefore appears to serve as an instrument to cut down on democracy and to increase inequa...

We tend to forget it, but the development cooperation agenda started, more than fifty years ago, with the aim of reducing the income gap between what is now called rich and poor countries. In the 1970s, when too many people started to believe in t...

Strengthening Democratic Institutions for development effectiveness

England has been in the grip of looting, rioting and vandalism during the past days. And being in England at the moment - with BBC News on in the background - I’m reading a speech by Professor of Economics at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques de Pa...

Andy Storey, lecturer at University College Dublin and chairperson of Action from Ireland, questions the validity of the euro. He argues that the monetary union was designed to foreclose democracy....

The dust has settled. Shaheer George is finally able to look back at the recent events in Egypt and does so at the TNI Fellows Meeting in Amsterdam (3-4 June 2011). George is an Egyptian youth activist, active in pro-democracy groups including the...

Social change

Who would have thought of comparing or matching Turkey and Brazil? Well, illustrious Brazilian author Jorge Amado did it when he wrote a great novel about a Turk, in fact an Ottoman Arab migrant, roaming the roads of Brazil in the early years of t...

‘The biggest failure of civil society organizations is their complete lack of political imagination,’ says Rakesh Rajani. ‘NGOs are bankrupt. They do some workshops here and there that you have to pay to attend. NGOs are cut off from reality, they...

Let us start with a confession: in the last couple of months we both wrote articles and made statements claiming that most Arab regimes – including the Gulf monarchies – were still steadily in control for some time to come. Regarding such statemen...

The uprising in North Africa and the Middle East calls for a thorough rethinking of the European Union's and its member states' policies towards the region. Europe’s reaction to the recent events in its backyard has been slow, ambivalent and witho...

The current developments in the Arab world should be a wake-up call for policy makers and opinion leaders in the West. What is happening in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries puts democracy support back on the foreign policy agenda. Stability...

The blog ‘Current Global Affairs’ provides a window for reflection on news events, topical issues and developments. The blog focuses on the wider implications of current affairs, beyond the immediate impact of events as-they-unfold. Would you like...

I used to joke about my unusual life, being a sculptor, environmental activist, development politician. I lived in a mountain village in New Mexico at 9,000 feet (back to the land!), in a studio storefront in Venice, California (loved the art scen...

Five years after its acceptance by the 2005 World Summit, it is time to consider the contribution that the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) has made and could make to the prevention of mass atrocities.

What role can civil society and (international) NGOs play in the rapidly changing global context? 

This week The Broker is blogging from the Towards Knowledge Democracy conference in Leiden, The Netherlands. 

Governments and institutes devote immense resources to learning how to avoid a relapse into war in post-conflict situations. But there is only a limited focus on preventing conflict in seemingly stable regions that are actually susceptible to viol...

Are shared democratic values the most important factors in promoting peace between countries, or common economic interests? New econometric research shows that, in the case of India and Pakistan, trade with other countries increases the chance of...