Voting in Wukan by Jordan Pouille James Madison famously remarked that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy. The present government of the People’s Republic of...
Read MoreThe 2012 Annual Symposium of The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) Tuesday, 20 November 2012, Canberra Workshop Description Background: Social science perspectives on Antarctica are limited in scope and quantity. In the fields of political science, international relations, legal studies...
Read MoreDuring my first encounter with him, in Prague in 1984, when everything seemed hopeless, I was struck by the man's hedgehog resilience. Here was a rarity: an unusual figure, intense but witty, a clear-headed thinker and a wonderful writer, a...
Read MoreVáclav Havel has died aged 75. A poet and playwright, a political writer, dissident and a politician, Havel was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia, and the first President of the Czech Republic founded in 1993. The Conversation spoke with...
Read More[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="668"] The first free elections borne from the Arab Spring were held in Tunisia. Over 90% of registered adults voted. EPA/Zacarias Garcia[/caption] It has been a tumultuous week in the life and times of democracy in the Mediterranean....
Read MoreMEDIA & DEMOCRACY: On the final day of The Conversation’s series on how the media influences the way our representatives develop policy, John Keane examines how the relationships between politicians, journalists, lobbyists and the PR sector undermine democracy. [caption id="" align="aligncenter"...
Read MoreWhen making sense of the weird things happening in the northern hemisphere one trend should not escape our notice: a deepening crisis caused by bankers’ greed is beginning to rip the guts out of democracy. Here’s what the textbooks say: in...
Read MoreAthens is no longer considered by scholars as the birthplace of democracy but all of a sudden it has become the epicentre of a powerful political earthquake rocking the foundations of every democracy in the Atlantic region. Street fighting has turned...
Read MoreOsama bin Laden is dead – assassinated a fortnight ago by bullets sprayed from the guns of special armed forces of the United States. During the wild celebrations that followed, the word “assassination” was never once used by politicians. There were...
Read MoreGreat revolutionary convulsions typically trigger long-lasting reflections on their causes and consequences. The European tradition of political thinking harbours many well-known examples, including Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Harold Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our...
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