This article examines the role of political leadership within the realm of global governance. Drawing upon relevant theories of political agency, particular attention is given to addressing the relationship between leadership and collective action. A two-level analysis of institution building in relation to maritime security and economic trade and investment reveals both strengths and weaknesse...

A "political theology," as I use the term here, is a society's understanding of its ultimate meaning in the context of reality as a whole, and in particular in light of what is taken to be divine or ultimate reality. Because human beings collectively as well as individually need their lives to have meaning, they will have a political theology of some sort, whether explicit or implicit, whether ...

In her essay ‘Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy’, Wendy Brown suggests that critical political theory needs to ‘mourn liberal democracy’ in order to develop a transformative vision of ‘the good’. The problem, as Brown outlines it, is not only that – to varying extents and in different scales across democratic states – market rationality has hollowed out representative structures an...

“Social Stomach” is a series of social, textual and “performative” or diogetic prototypes [1] that rethink the relation between food and technology and experiment with future metabolic exchanges that are biological, technological and political at the same time. Eating in this project represents the ultimate form of “cosmopolitics” [2], an ideal ground for design experiments with temporary assem...

This paper provides evidence concerning political participation (turnout, awareness, attendance at meetings, campaign involvement, voting) and its relation to local governance (targeting of public services) in a developing country, based on a rural household survey in West Bengal, India. We find that reported participation rates varied remarkably little with socio-economic status, with the exce...

Some autocracies are economically successful; others stagnate at low levels of production. Paradoxically, the latter ones appear to possess more natural resources and be more resistant to political change. This paper adresses a dynamic relation between the capital accumulation and the political regime in presence of resource rents. It argues that private capital accumulation increases an unfett...

The concept of power is a core term in political science, and an important one for other social sciences as well. According to Elster it is “the most important single idea in political theory, comparable perhaps to utility in economics” (Elster 1976, 249). Indeed political science can be conceived mainly as the study of power phenomena (Mokken and Stokman 1976, 47). Yet the discipline seems to ...

The study examined the relation between adolescents‟ interparental conflict perceptions and their political efficacy regarding local issues. Longitudinal data (age 15 and 17) from 444 adolescents wereanalyzed using structural equation modeling. Results showed that young people experiencing frequentinterparental conflict reported an increase in depressive mood during late adolescence, wh...

A day after the London 2012 Bid Committee succeeded in bringing the Olympic Games to Britain using the slogan “the world in one city”, a series of coordinated suicide bomb attacks occurred across London (7/7). In one day, Britain’s somewhat beleaguered multiculturalism went from prompting national celebrations to being decried as “dead” by politicians and commentators alike. Against a backdrop ...