Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law is housed in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies
In this article, Oliver Roy argues that in order to grasp what is happening in the Middle East, a number of deep-rooted prejudices must be set aside. First among them is the assumption that democracy presupposes secularization; the democratization movement in the Arab world came precisely after thirty years of what has been called the “return of the sacred,” an obvious process of re-Islamization of everyday life, coupled with the rise of Islamist parties. The second is the idea that a democrat must also, by definition, be a liberal.
There is consensus that even while human trafficking is increasingly the subject of international, national and local attention by treaty making bodies, legislatures and law enforcement agencies, the results of these formal mechanisms have been patchy at best and meager at worst. There is less consensus on how to tackle the push/pull dynamics of trafficking, and even less agreement on the best ways to intervene in the deep structural determinants of poverty, patriarchy, and poor or apathetic governance.
This book originated in a conference on "Liberation Technology in Authoritarian Regimes" held at Stanford University in Oct. 2010.
The revolutions sweeping the Middle East provide dramatic evidence of the role that technology plays in mobilizing citizen protest and upending seemingly invulnerable authoritarian regimes. A grainy cell phone video of a Tunisian street vendor’s self-immolation helped spark the massive protests that toppled longtime ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, and Egypt’s "Facebook revolution" forced the ruling regime out of power and into exile.
The central problem in human trafficking since the first global efforts to abolish the slave trade in the late eighteenth century is the persistence of demand for unfree women, children, and men. Women and children have increasingly composed the largest share of trafficked people. Women and children can be forced into a wide range of work—from sex work and domestic labor to farm work and low skilled manufacturing—where their labor and their bodies are exploited by their owners and their clients.
Some twelve years after the unveiling of the UN Anti-Trafficking Protocol in 2000, most European countries have sound anti-trafficking legislation. Worldwide, while many countries amend their legislation and policies, they follow practice developed, applied and tested in Western Europe. Some of these practices consider national and international coordination and cooperation for an effective anti-trafficking policy.
South Africa’s international obligation to combat human trafficking in terms of the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (Palermo Protocol) requires the promulgation of comprehensive counter-trafficking legislation. The present counter-trafficking legislative response is fragmented. Transitional anti-trafficking provisions are included in the Children’s Act, which criminalises all types of child trafficking, and in the Sexual Offences Amendment Act, which criminalises sex trafficking.
In an article for Foreign Policy, Karl Eikenberry makes the case for the United States to invigorate its relations with Taiwan and outlines the work needed to make this a reality and stabilize security in the Asia-Pacific region.
This is the first paper in the BDC-Stanford Project on Arab Transitions series, authored Dr. Tamir Moustafa of Simon Fraser University in Canada and entitled “Drafting Egypt’s New Constitution: Can a New Legal Framework Revive a Flawed Transition?”.