ples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people. Democratic confeder...

1 Institute of Tropical Medicine, Antwerp, Belgium, 2 University of Kinshasa, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, 3 Division of International and Humanitarian Medicine, Geneva University Hospitals & University of Geneva, Geneva, Switzerland, 4 Programme National de Lutte contre la Trypanosomiase Humaine Africaine, Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, 5 Médecins Sans Frontières Access...

In recent years many transformations have occurred in Iranian society and women and girls still have a lot of worries about comes to urban public spaces. Also, due to some ambiguities in defining the domain of public space in traditional Islamic cities and gaps in the knowledge related to the Kurdish cities, the main problem of this paper is how we can define a participatory approach to improve...

In every society in many arenas, the reality of collective decision making falls far short of the democratic ideal in countless ways. These shortfalls include disenfranchisement, unequal influence operating through formal and informal mechanisms, political apathy and alienation, misinformation, and misperception. Part of the solutions to these challenges lies in a sound democratic constitution....

I BEGIN WITH A QUANDARY that is very familiar to Martin Ostwald: Classical Athens saw the invention of both democracy and political theory, yet while we have a number of examples of criticism of democracy, no systematic defense of democracy-no democratic theory-survives from an Athenian pen. I propose that the conundrum is best explained by assuming that from the late fifth through the late fou...

Discussion of the democratic strengths or, more usually, weaknesses of the EU tends to focus on the degree of democracy that is available or possible at the EU level. Such thinking reflects a certain neo-functionalist logic that has governed much scholarly writing about the relationship between EU integration and democracy. It assumes that enhanced competences for EU institutions potentially cr...