‘Democracies make elections, elections don’t make democracies.’ This applies particularly to Afghanistan that has been trying to be a democracy since the Bonn Agreement that created the country’s post-Taliban government in 2001. Even more desperate than this attempt are the never-tiring efforts of the West, especially the United States, to approach Afghanistan as a Western-style [...]

This question seems totally meaningless. Aung San Suu Kyi has spent most of her life between prison and house-arrest. The verdict at the end of this week will again be one of the two. Freedom and justice will again be denied to world’s most popular brave Burmese opposition leader and to the people of Burma.
The [...]

The 56-page report entitled ‘Hostages to Peace: Threats to Human Rights and Democracy in Somaliland’ affirms that the government in Somaliland has, indeed, instituted a semblance of democratic stability in the country despite the existence of armed conflict.
However, the government continues to disregard the rule of law and undermine democratic processes. A crisis in the [...]

A leading Confucian intellectual in China makes the proposal for a political system that will give equal emphasis to the otherwise ignored sectors of modern democracies: foreigners, future generations, and ancestors. “Is democracy really the best way to protect future victims of global warming?” he asks.
Confucianism is premised on human kinships that eventually find themselves [...]

Supporters of the World Trade Organization have sung praises on how the organization is the institution of even the smallest countries and the most inconsequential economies. They evoke an impression of a welcoming congregation where everybody has an equal footing, equal voice, equal presence, and equal significance. That’s an impossible scenario, of course. There’s nothing [...]

Weeks after the disputed elections, the fiery pro-democracy protests in Iran are almost off. However, arrests continue on more than 400 journalists and 40 politicians. The infamous militia of the Revolutionary Guards who are in charge of the dirty work are barely visible on the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, Kerman, Shiraz, and Tabriz. They have [...]

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez’s government is definitely not democratic. He has been on a rampage to limit private capital in his country, expropriating several private properties to nationalize them – arbitrarily. Last month, Chavez announced over national television that in Venezuela, “there is no private land.” This means that in his country, there is no [...]

For a few months now, we have been hearing about the scenario that socialism is gradually but surely inching its way well into the social, political, and economic processes of the greatest superpower on earth, the United States of America. The federal government would have been loath to make these US businesses fail. Neither will [...]

The very recent elections in Kuwait is proof that Islamists are not bound to succeed in this country. Four women were elected to parliament out of the 50 seats up for voting, and by all indication, the country is headed towards greater democracy.
The Kuwait elections may just be an auspicious start of the reinvigorated democratic [...]

There is a new breed of dissidents in China today as the country ‘tolerates a safer wave of protests’ 20 years after the Tiananmen Square massacre. The ordinary Chinese are much more critical of human rights now and some of them have been keen to defend such rights. 
On June 3 and 4, 1989, a military [...]