Deliberative democracy is theoretically plausible and institutionally impracticable
Essay - 5 pages - Political science
What we mean today when referring to 'democracy' is, according to some scholars, 'a way of organising the state that has come to be narrowly identified with territorially based competitive elections of political leadership for legislative and executive offices' . The problem with...
Is there a 'responsibility to protect'? Is the UN capable of protecting the victims of internal conflicts?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
Civil wars are, today, since the end of the Cold War, the dominant form of conflicts all around the world. For instance, as Stephen John Stedman explains, 'all thirty-five of the wars in 1997 were primarily internal' . Massive violence, destruction and killing tend, so, nowadays, to...
How have social democratic parties changed over the last 25 years?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
The changes of the last 30, and especially 25 years have produced an unexpected and important indentity crisis for all parties rooted in the tradition of Western European reformistsocialism. In fact, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the world experienced great changes such as new expectations...
Do we need feminist theory in International Relations? If so why?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
Feminism is a critical social and political movement who first emerged at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth with women's claims of equal rights in society and in the political sphere, with the right of vote. But now, since approximately the end of the...
Is the United Nations running the same risk as its predecessor the League of Nations of being made marginal or even irrelevant? Why or why not?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
'The League is dead, long live the United Nations!' This is with these words that Lord Robert Cecil, one of the architects of the League of Nations, commented on the dissolution of the organization, in the spring 1946, expressing the apparent readiness to write the League off as a failure...
Why has the UN Charter remained a central plank of international order, even though it was formulated in wartime by only a few of the victorious powers?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
'If we had had this Charter a few years ago-and above all, the will to use it- millions now dead would be alive. If we should falter in the future in our will to use it, millions now living will surely die.' (Truman) This quotation shows the ambition the Charter has and the hope its...
Is each age blessed or doomed with the presence of an empire?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
“Veni, vidi, vici...”[I came, I saw, I conquered] Julius Caesar. This quote from one of the most famous Roman generals reflects the principle of a major phenomenon in international relations: empires, a phenomenon which dates back as far as 2334 BC with the reign of Sargon of Akkad, and...
Is capitalism a positive or negative force in International Relations?
Essay - 5 pages - International relations
In 1995, the 200 most powerful multi-national corporations controlled approximately one third of the world GNP The turnover of these companies sometimes exceeds the GNP of some countries: one example is General Motors which with a turnover of 132 billion dollars surpasses the GNP of Indonesia....
Contrast and compare the political ideology, support base and political strategy of the Pakistani Jamaat-i-Islami and the Iranian Islamic Revolution
Essay - 8 pages - Political science
The events of this beginning of century have shown the resistance and the diversity of an Islamism, which certain had already buried. According to Bobby S. Sayyid, ‘Islamism is a discourse that attempts to centre Islam within the political order. Islamism can range from the assertion of a...
Does social constructivism really add anything new to debates about security?
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
During the late 1980s, when debates between neorealists and neoliberals seemed to exhaust themselves, so-called ‘constructivist' researches made their appearance. By asserting themselves as an alternative to realism, they reinterpret its main concepts (power, national interest,...
To what extent did the colonial state openly side with metropolitan capitalist interests and missionaries lobbies against indigenous interests?
Essay - 9 pages - Political science
Ghana was a victim of the British Empire's colonialism, from the establishment of the South as a Crown's possession in1874 to the independence of the country in 1957. Basically, colonialism can be defined as a particular form of imperialism: the colonial imperialism, notion mainly developed by...
The European Union and organized crime
Essay - 8 pages - European union
With French and Dutch voters' recent rejection of the proposed constitutional treaty for the European Union, a number of proposals in the field of Justice and Home Affairs have been watered down or considerably postponed. However, both EU leaders and the general public continue to place high...
Iran's nuclear program
Essay - 9 pages - International relations
As diplomats from the 190 signatory countries gather in New York this week for the five-yearly review of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), Iran will surely be present in many minds. Although some warning signs had been issued by various intelligence services during the previous decade,...
The American bureaucracy on national security
Essay - 6 pages - Political science
In his book The Power Game, Hedrick Smith speaks of the foreign policy game in the United States as a “bureaucratic tribal warfare”, using a tribal metaphor to describe the fierce fights which take place in Washington, DC. The notion of bureaucracy emerged in the early 20th century,...
The European Union and national sovereignty
Essay - 3 pages - European union
The birth of the modern sovereign state is usually associated with the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, after which modern nation-states began to constitute in Europe. Today, some scholars argue that state sovereignty has been challenged by trends such as globalization and European integration not...
The UK and the Euro
Essay - 3 pages - European union
Exposé en Anglais sur le Royaume-Uni et un passage éventuel à l'euro, qui examine les différents arguments favorables et opposés à l'adoption de la monnaie européenne. Soon after election, in 1997, the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, said that four of the five tests had not been met (only the...
The integration of the European Union
Thesis - 6 pages - European union
On the 16th April, 2003, ten new members were signing the adhesion treaty to the European Union, in front of the Parthenon in Athens. The adhesion of these ten new countries, among which eight were ex-communist countries, represented a historic moment : the European unification eastwards, so much...
Landmines in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Thesis - 5 pages - International relations
The conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina began shortly after the republic declared its independence from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY) in March 1992 and lasted nearly four years. A cease-fire was called in September 1995. A general framework agreement (the “Dayton...
Is multilateralism still viable today?
Thesis - 5 pages - International relations
After WWII, various multilateral organizations have been promoted by the US and implemented through many international organizations such as the UN, the GATT and the IMF. Overtime, multilateral co-operation dramatically developed in different forms (Summits, Conferences, etc...). However, critics...
To what extent is the clausewitzian account of war a political instrument relevant in the twenty-first century ?
Thesis - 5 pages - Political science
Clausewitz's description of war as a means to an end or, to use his own formulation, “the continuation of politics by other means”, must be interpreted against the contemporary intellectual background: the majority of enlightenment writers had regarded war as an aberration, an...
Does Realism still provide a convincing analysis of international relationships ?
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
Realism arose as a theory after World War II because of the perceived failure of a world guided by Liberal Internationalist principles. The tension fraught era of the Cold War were ideal conditions for the stark, suspicious pragmaticism espoused by the likes of E.H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau....
The current situation of small scale coffee production in Latin America
Thesis - 7 pages - Economy general
Recently, the global coffee market has fallen into a profound crisis. Prices paid to coffee producers in real dollar terms, have fallen to a hundred year low. Many families have been forced to abandon traditional farming. There is consequently an important wave of unemployment in the farming...
What is representative democracy? Is it aim to restrict or to promote popular rule?
Thesis - 4 pages - Political science
One may accept, as Dahl did, that representative democracy is a means to democratize a government. Yet, representative democracy is far from being a true democracy, both restricting and promoting popular rule. The concept of representative democracy derived from the criticism of absolutism, held...
What is human security?
Essay - 6 pages - International relations
The end of Cold War brought new global challenges to the security field. The arousal of new forms of conflict, such as internal wars and terrorism made it important to rethink civilian protection as the centre of this new perspective of security. Threats to security are no longer restricted to...
Are protestants better capitalists ?
Thesis - 6 pages - Social, moral & civic education
First, we will see that if protestant theology has undoubtedly influenced the early expansion of capitalism in America, it is probably no longer the main factor explaining the important commitment of Protestants to modern capitalism. As an illustration of this fact, we will show that even among...
"The postnational constellation" by J. Habermas
Thesis - 7 pages - International relations
“The image of a post national constellation gives rise to alamrist feelings of enlightened helplessness widely observed in the political arena today” . Indeed, the ideal of cosmopolitanism is generating new controversy today with the challenges of globalization. In The Post national...
The welfare sate - cleavages between Germany and the United Kingdom
Thesis - 8 pages - Social, moral & civic education
Since the comfortable mixture of economic growth and welfare state expansion has come to an end the welfare state has been subjected to a crisis discussion. Its integrative capacity and its ability to compromise different class interests have been doubted. It was assumed that the higher status...
How long can the 'Pay As You Go' pensions last? (followed by the case-study of France)
Case study - 8 pages - Social, moral & civic education
Most countries do provide retirement pension schemes within the framework of Pay As You Go pensions. This system however encounters today some unprecedented drawbacks, mainly due to the burden of an ageing population. The future of the retirement system is a real economic concern, not simply a...
Hedley Bull's The Anarchical Society. London, Macmillan, 1977
Thesis - 6 pages - International relations
Bull's The Anarchical Society is a ground-breaking book that proposes novel, powerful concepts for reading today's world order as well as the order that prevailed in the world in 1977. Today more than ever, we need the idea of international society, even if it has to be revisited to fit...
'Washington bears a considerable amount of the responsibility for the radicalism of the Iranian Revolution and the resultant deterioration in US-Iranian relations'
Essay - 3 pages - International relations
'When examining the policies that the United States conducted toward Iran from 1945 to 1979, one cannot help but realize that Washington bears a considerable amount of the responsibility for the radicalism of the Iranian Revolution and the resultant deterioration in US-Iranian relations.'...
