From Autocracy to Democracy: The Effort to Establish Market Democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan Conference

The conference focused the legal, political, economic, and security issues facing post-war Iraq and Afghanistan

O Brasil e o CARICOM

O estudo das relações entre o Brasil e o CARICOM e outros países caribenhos tem sido historicamente negligenciado pelos analistas brasileiros, o que pode ser comprovado pelo número extremamente pequeno de publicações direcionadas ao assunto. Este artigo tenta proporcionar uma visão geral dos aspectos históricos, diplomáticos, econômicos e políticos, bem como uma perspectiva futura destas relações.The study of the relationship between Brazil and the Caribbean Community, as well as with the Caribbean countries as a whole, have been historically left aside by Brazilian analysts, with an extremely limited amount of publications directed to the subject. This paper hopes to make an overview of historical, diplomatic, economic and political aspects and present events, as well as to offer a perspective of what the future might hold for the relationship between Brazil, the Caribbean Community and its member countries

Bolivia and the paradoxes of democratic consolidation

In Bolivia from the 1990s on, two presidents were ousted by popular protests, and protests were rampant. The protests expressed a growing discontent not only with successive administrations and their policies but with politics itself. The polity failed to built trust in democracy, ignored or repressed protests, and thus contributed to a process of democratic "deconsolidation." The main factors were corruption and the reluctance of the traditional political parties to discuss the neoliberal economic model. As a result, the current administration of Evo Morales faces two challenges: to change economic policies and to repair the support for democracy

Partners No More: Relational Transformation and the Turn to Litigation in Two Conservationist Organizations

The rise in litigation against administrative bodies by environmental and other political interest groups worldwide has been explained predominantly through the liberalization of standing doctrines. Under this explanation, termed here the floodgate model, restrictive standing rules have dammed the flow of suits that groups were otherwise ready and eager to pursue. I examine this hypothesis by analyzing processes of institutional transformation in two conservationist organizations: the Sierra Club in the United States and the Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI). Rather than an eagerness to embrace newly available litigation opportunities, as the floodgate model would predict, the groups\u27 history reveals a gradual process of transformation marked by internal, largely intergenerational divisions between those who abhorred conflict with state institutions and those who saw such conflict as not only appropriate but necessary to the mission of the group. Furthermore, in contrast to the pluralist interactions that the floodgate model imagines, both groups\u27 relations with pertinent agencies in earlier eras better accorded with the partnership-based corporatist paradigm. Sociolegal research has long indicated the importance of relational distance to the transformation of interpersonal disputes. I argue that, at the group level as well, the presence or absence of a (national) partnership-centered relationship determines propensities to bring political issues to court. As such, well beyond change in groups\u27 legal capacity and resources, current increases in levels of political litigation suggest more fundamental transformations in the structure and meaning of relations between citizen groups and the state