Kategoria BISAC: Political Science >> World - General

In recent decades, governments and NGOs--in an effort to promote democracy, freedom, fairness, and stability throughout the world--have organized teams of observers to monitor elections in a variety of countries. But when more organizations join the practice without uniform standards, are assessments reliable? When politicians nonetheless cheat and monitors must return to countries even after two decades of engagement, what is accomplished? Monitoring Democracy argues that the practice of international election monitoring is broken, but still worth fixing. By analyzing the evolving...

The protests unleashed by Iran's disputed presidential election in June 2009 brought the Islamic Republic's vigorous cyber culture to the world's attention. Iran has an estimated 700,000 bloggers, and new media such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube were thought to have played a key role in spreading news of the protests. The Internet is often celebrated as an agent of social change in countries like Iran, but most literature on the subject has struggled to grasp what this new phenomenon actually means. How is it different from print culture? Is it really a new public sphere? Will the...

The gathering of information by the Intelligence Services is now an issue of major importance in the modern world. But what are the ethical responsibilities of these bodies? How is that intelligence collected, assessed and used? What is the impact and significance of the new protective state that has been constructed in Whitehall over the years since 2001?

With new threats appearing to society both at home and abroad and sweeping changes being made to the law and Government, intelligence and police authorities where does the debate now take...

Despite their small populations, the Arab states of the Gulf exercise an enormous and global influence. But all-too-often, these states are treated as if their only importance were as pawns in a global strategic board game, and are simply dealt with as mere models of the intersection of oil, wealth and power. Here, Dresch and Piscatori bring together a more nuanced picture: exploring how the citizen populations of these states define themselves in a wider context.Examining the issues such as Gulf-owned transnational media, the role of women in the Kuwaiti state and the way Saudi...

Natural resources often stretch across borders that separate modern nation states. This can create conflict and limit opportunities for regulated consumption of their goods and services, but also provide opportunities for joint multinational efforts that exceed single country capabilities.

This book illustrates the diversity of transborder natural resources, the pressures that they experience or the opportunities that exist for multinational regulatory regimes, monitoring and enforcement. It presents ten case studies of transborder natural resources that are of interest to two or...