As it turns out, the big story so far from the American presidential campaign is the turnout. Evidence is mounting that U.S. voters are shaking off their customary apathy and voting in record numbers. Not only that, the surge of extra voters is clearly tilted in favor of the Democrats, a trend that may be setting the stage for a Democratic landslide in November.
The whole process of the Lisbon Treaty’s ratification over recent weeks, both here and abroad, has revealed just how undemocratic a construct the EU project has become. In France the Treaty has now been rushed through without another referendum, despite clearly expressed hostility towards the Constitution, in order to avoid […]
The spectre of a debt crisis, the first signs of which were seen in the Third World in the 1970s, and the fear of world finances’ disintegration, led the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank (WB) to propose Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) to the developing world. This essay will start with a description of the long term advantages of SAPs, as advocated by the IMF and the WB (including elements of the neo-liberal philosophy presented as an ideological basis for the programmes) before assessing the short term disadvantages of SAPs – largely revolving around unsustainable growth.
The policies of the Bush Administration and the conduct of the United States and its allies in counteracting the threat of terrorism have received a wealth of criticism, much of which has been aired publicly. This essay focuses on a critique that does not see much light beyond academic literature: the successful construction of a terrorist threat which has legitimised a war in its name.
Using theories of cognitive consistency and identity, this essay seeks to understand the impact of a conflict’s portrayal on the decision to intervene. To illustrate, the essay analyses the inaction of the United Nations in the face of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.
Government policies often generate unintended consequences. This has turned out to be the case with the aggressive biofuel policies pursued over recent years by the European Union and the United States.
There is a worrying trend of growing apathy amongst young people towards politics. The United Kingdom’s Electoral Commission published a report in 2002 called ‘Making an Impact’, which found that voter turnout among young people was at an unprecedented low point at the 2001 general election.
As in the other five slums in the city, people in Eastleigh are poor. They survive on far less than the average daily wage in Kenya, which is equal to about one and a half U.S. dollars. Lack of food is only one of their troubles. The political turmoil has exposed and exacerbated decades-worth of tribal tensions. While apparent to many Kenyans, for most of the international community, those tensions were hidden under the thin veneer of an emerging democracy with steady economic development and relative state stability.
This essay argues that neoliberalism seeks to frame highly political and morally-charged operations within a bland discourse that insists on the neutrality of the market. Thus it is necessarily flawed in its contribution to the study of offshore, because it attempts to disguise the invariably political and pragmatic functions of offshore in the contemporary global political economy.
It is a trite but commonplace observation that we are witnessing a resurgence in religion and religious fundamentalism; that the secularist progression envisaged by linear models of social development has not come to fruition. This essay seeks both to contest the notion that secularisation can be seen as a universal or absolute process and, further, to problematise certain critical approaches which understand ‘religion’ as a site of autonomy and resistance against these totalising discourses.
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