The International Politics Of Democratization

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com. This insightful and timely book introduces an explanatory theory for surveying global and international politics. Describing the nature and effects of democracy beyond the state, Hans Agné explores peace and conflict, migration politics, resource distribution, regime effectiveness, foreign policy and posthuman politics through the lens of democratism to both supplement and challenge established research paradigms.

How does regional interdependence influence the prospects for conflict, integration, and democratization? Some researchers look at the international system at large and disregard the enormous regional variations. Others take the concept of sovereignty literally and treat each nation-state as fully independent. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch looks at disparate zones in the international system to see how conflict, integration, and democracy have clustered over time and space. He argues that the most interesting aspects of international politics are regional rather than fully global or exclusively national. Differences in the local context of interaction influence states' international behavior as well as their domestic attributes. In All International Politics Is Local, Gleditsch clarifies that isolating the domestic processes within countries cannot account for the observed variation in distribution of political democracy over time and space, and that the likelihood of transitions is strongly related to changes in neighboring countries and the prior history of the regional context. Finally, he demonstrates how spatial and statistical techniques can be used to address regional interdependence among actors and its implications. Kristian Skrede Gleditsch is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego.

Argues that international institutions are becoming increasingly democratized.

There is much speculation about whether democracy is still advancing around the world and the influence that leading authoritarian or semi-authoritarian regimes such as Russia are starting to have on the trends. This collection assesses global trends in democratisation, reviews the condition of international democracy promotion and enquires into whether serious competition in the form of autocracy promotion is now a major possibility. The influence of international politics on national political regimes is explored in more detail for Russia’s resistance to democracy promotion and Russian influence on regimes in Central Asia in particular, along with an Indian perspective on India’s reluctance to push for democracy abroad and concerns that democracy promotion itself should be considered more critically if it undermines democratisation in foreign aid-dependent states. The book concludes by briefly addressing the potential significance of the 2011 ‘Arab spring’ for these themes. This book was published as a special issue of Contemporary Politics.

There is a major contradiction in contemporary politics: there has been a wave of democratization that has swept across much of the world, while at the same time globalization appears to have reduced the social forces that have built democracy historically. This book, by an international group of authors, analyzes the ways in which local politics in developing countries - often neglected in work on democratization - render democratic experiments more or less successful in realizing substantial democracy.

Jack Snyder is a leading American international relations scholar with an international reputation for his research on IR theory and US Foreign policy. This book collects many of his most important essays into a single volume. Exploring a liberal realist theory of international politics, the book is arranged around three key subject areas: Anarchy and Its Effects The Challenges of Democratic Consolidation Empire and the Promotion of a Liberal Order With a new introduction to frame the selected essays, this collection examines how developing nations evolve political systems, and fit into a world dominated by liberal-democracies. It looks to the future for the current dominant powers in a changing world of international relations and at the challenges to their leadership. Featuring a new conclusion, developed from the assembled chapters, this is a fascinating and vital collection of scholarship from one of the most influential theorists of his generation. Power and Progress is an invaluable text for students and scholars of international relations, and those interested in the debates on liberalism and realism, and comparative politics.

Explores democracy's remarkable rise from obscurity to centre stage in contemporary international relations, from the rogue democratic state of 18th Century France to Western pressures for countries throughout the world to democratise.