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Since the September 11 attacks, President George W. Bush has rhetorically pledged to make the promotion of democracy abroad a primary objective of U.S. foreign policy, emphasizing the moral and strategic imperatives for advancing freedom around the world. At the same time, the United States has become both less liked and less admired by governments and societies around the world. Although its roots are deep, this latest spike in anti-Americanism comes largely as the result of Bushs most significant foreign policy initiative, the invasion of Iraq, which has been extremely unpopular both in democratic and nondemocratic states. In its history, the United States has probably never before suffered such a low international standing.

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The Washington Quarterly
Authors
Michael A. McFaul
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A unique publication exploring the opportunities for addressing ten of the most serious challenges facing the world today: Climate Change, Communicable Diseases, Conflicts, Education, Financial Instability, Corruption, Migration, Malnutrition and Hunger, Trade Barriers, Access to Water. In a world fraught with problems and challenges, we need to gauge how to achieve the greatest good with our money. Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a rich set of arguments and data for prioritising our response most effectively. Each problem is introduced by a world-renowned expert defining the scale of the problem and describing the costs and benefits of a range of policy options to improve the situation. Each challenge is evaluated by economists from North America, Europe and China who attempt a ranking of the most promising options. Whether you agree or disagree with the analysis or conclusions, Global Crises, Global Solutions provides a serious, yet accessible, springboard for debate and discussion.

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Cambridge University Press, in "Global Crises, Global Solutions"
Authors
Peter Blair Henry
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The new millennium began with the triumph of democracy and markets. But for whom is life just, how so, and why? And what is being done to correct persisting injustices? Blending macro-level global and national analysis with in-depth grassroots detail, the contributors highlight roots of injustices, how they are perceived, and efforts to alleviate them. Following up on issues raised in the groundbreaking best-seller Power and Popular Protest: Latin American Social Movements (California, 2001), these essays elucidate how conceptions of justice are socially constructed and contested and historically contingent, shaped by people's values and institutionally grounded in real-life experiences. The contributors, a stellar coterie of North and Latin American scholars, offer refreshing new insights that deepen our understanding of social justice as ideology and practice.

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University of California Press, in "What Justice? Whose Justice?"
Authors
Terry L. Karl
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Why does Nigeria have a history of failed republics, failed governance as well as false starts and dead-ends on the path to economic development, social coherence, and peace? Is the Fourth Republic condemned to the fate of previous ones, or can it rise above the heavy weight ofthe past and chart a different path for itself? In this volume of 26 chapters, put together to honour one of Nigeria's foremost political scientists, four generations of political scientists, economists, political economists, sociologists, psychologists, international relations experts, lawyers, historians and specialists in literature from Africa and North America provide fresh and succinct insights on these and other posers in original essays that range from the theoretical to the analytical, from those that are historical and comparative to those that focus on the current situation in that important African country.

The essays focus on. four cardinal points that sin post Nigeria's perennial struggle for democracy and good governance as cause, effect and terrain. These are the structure, history, processes and dynamics of the country's putative federal system; governance issues; the formation and transformation of identities; and the global contexts of the production and reproduction of the Nigerian state, economy and society.

The book will be of great value to Nigerians, friends of Nigeria, and all those interested in understanding the path that has led Nigeria to its present, state and in finding alternative pathways to a future that is more democratic, better governed, and more developed.

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Ibadan University Press
Authors
Larry Diamond
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The report presented here is the result of several months of meetings and debate. It represents an effort to lay out the broad contours of a transatlantic strategy to promote democracy and human development in the Broader Middle East could and should look like. The authors challenge us to go beyond current conventional wisdom and propose the building blocks of a grand strategy to help the broader Middle East transform itself. Their ideas they present are intended to spur further debate and discussion, including with democrats and reformers in the region itself.

The German Marshall Fund is proud to present this strategy report as the Istanbul Paper #1 in the run-up to the NATO Istanbul summit. This paper is intended to help further a dialogue that has already begun across the Atlantic and with the region but which now must be deepened. In doing so, we hope to make a contribution to greater understanding and cooperation across the Atlantic on one of the key challenges of our era.

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Policy Briefs
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The German Marshall Fund of the United States
Authors
Larry Diamond
Michael A. McFaul
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Daron Acemoglu is Charles P. Kindleberger Professor of Applied Economics in the Department of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the Economic Growth program of the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research. He is also affiliated with the National Bureau Economic Research, Center for Economic Performance, and Center for Economic Policy Research.

His work has been published in leading scholarly journals, including the American Economic Review, Journal of Political Economy, Quarterly Journal Economics and Review of Economic Studies to name a few. Daron Acemoglu's research covers a wide range of areas within economics, including political economy, economic development and growth, human capital theory, growth theory, technical change, and search theory. Acemoglu is also the editor of the Review of Economics and Statistics, and associate editor of the Journal of Economic Growth.

Abstract of paper presented in this research seminar

This paper develops a model where there is a trade-off between the enforcement of the property rights of different groups. An "oligarchic" society, where political power is in the hands of major producers, protects their property rights, but also tends to erect significant entry barriers, violating the property rights of future producers. Democracy, where political power is more widely diffused, imposes redistributive taxes on the producers, but tends to avoid entry barriers. When taxes in democracy are high and the distortions caused by entry barriers are low, an oligarchic society achieves greater efficiency. Nevertheless, because comparative advantage in entrepreneurship shifts away from the incumbents, the inefficiency created by entry barriers in oligarchy deteriorates over time. The typical pattern is therefore one of the rise and decline of oligarchic societies: of two otherwise identical societies, the one with an oligarchic organization will first become richer, but later fall behind the democratic society. I also discuss how democratic societies may be better able to take advantage of new technologies, how an oligarchic society might transition to democracy because of within-elite conflict, and how the unequal distribution of income in oligarchy supports the oligarchic institutions and may keep them in place even when they become significantly costly to society.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Daron Acemoglu Professor of Economics MIT
Seminars
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Feisal Istrabadi is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations, and one of Iraq's most important constitutional thinkers. He was one of the principal legal drafters of Iraq's interim constitution (adopted on March 8 of 2004) and the lead author of its Bill of Fundamental Rights. During 2002-2003 he was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group and the Transitional Justice Working Group of the Future of Iraq project. A native of Iraq, he was schooled in the United States and practiced law in the central United States for fifteen years, with extensive trial and appellate court experience. He holds Bachelor's of Science and Doctor of Jurisprudence degrees from Indiana University, and has been a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

Oksenberg Conference Room

Feisal Istrabadi Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations
Lectures
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Barry Weingast is the Ward C. Krebs Family Professor and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and Professor of Political Science at Stanford University. He served as chair of the Political Science Department from 1996 to 2001. He is also a professor of economics, by courtesy, at Stanford.Weingast is an expert in political economy and public policy, the political foundation of markets and economic reform, U.S. politics, and regulation. Weingast authored (with Robert Bates, Avner Grief, Margaret Levi, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal) Analytic Narratives, published in 1998. Weingast is editor, with Kenneth A. Shepsle, of Positive Theories of Congressional Institutions (University of Michigan Press, 1995). His current research focuses on the political determinants of public policymaking and the political foundations of markets and democracy.

Douglass C. North was the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Economics. He is currently the Hoover Institution's Bartlett Burnap Senior Fellow. His 1990 Cambridge University Press Book, Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, is a staple in graduate courses in political economy around the world. North's current research activities include research on property rights, transaction costs, economic organization in history, a theory of the state, the free rider problem, ideology, growth of government, economic and social change, and a theory of institutional change.

John Wallis is a Professor of Economics at the University of Maryland. He is the author of American Economic Growth and Standards of Living Before the Civil War, with Robert Gallman, NBER, University of Chicago Press, 1992, as well as numerous articles and book chapters on American economic history.

Encina Hall Basement Conference Room

Barry Weingast Professor of Political Science Stanford University
Douglass North Hoover Senior Fellow Stanford University
John Wallis Professor of Economics University of Maryland
Seminars
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Feisal Istrabadi is the Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations, and one of Iraq's most important constitutional thinkers. He was one of the principal legal drafters of Iraq's interim constitution (adopted on March 8 of 2004) and the lead author of its Bill of Fundamental Rights. During 2002-2003 he was a member of the Democratic Principles Working Group and the Transitional Justice Working Group of the Future of Iraq project. A native of Iraq, he was schooled in the United States and practiced law in the central United States for fifteen years, with extensive trial and appellate court experience. He holds Bachelor's of Science and Doctor of Jurisprudence degrees from Indiana University, and has been a senior fellow at the International Human Rights Law Institute, College of Law, DePaul University, Chicago.

He will be speaking about his experiences in drafting the Iraqi interim constitution as well as the current political situation in Iraq.

Encina Basement Conference Room

Feisal Istrabadi Deputy Permanent Representative of Iraq to the United Nations
Seminars
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