Authoritarian rule, poorly functioning legal systems and dilapidated education and health infrastructure dominate the scene in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia and the Southern Caucasus. The region has not, however, developed uniformly since independence. In the Southern Caucasus two...

Democracy’s march to presumed global victory has ground to a halt. Democracy promotion, a boom industry in the 1990s, has come under criticism. While there are still good reasons to promote democracy abroad, there must be some rethinking if new successes are to be achieved: moving away from...

Peacebuilding and state building have been discussed in the past as concepts having a difficult relationship with one another, at times involving trade-offs and even dilemmas. Analysing this relationship on the basis of relevant OECD/DAC documents, this briefing paper argues that the two...

Many a democratisation process since the end of the Cold War has proved to be a flash in the pan. On a global scale the steps taken in democratisation have been backwards rather than forwards for some years, at least until recent events in the Arab world. Stable democracies have emerged mainly...

Europe has been discussing how to deal with the arrival of hundreds of thousands of refugees from the Middle East, Africa and other parts of the world for months now. However, one frequently overlooked aspect is the fact that just a small percentage of the world's approximately 60 million...

Civil wars and other armed conflicts within states kill tens of thousands of civilians every year, destroy many more livelihoods and have forced millions of people to flee their homes over the last five years alone. For many years since the mid-1990s, armed intrastate conflicts seemed to be...

How can international actors effectively support peace after civil war? So far, empirical research has established that peacekeeping can be an effective instrument in maintaining peace, but little systematic knowledge exists on the roles that other types of peace support can play. International...

The development cooperation (DC) of the United Nations (UN) at the end of the 1990s can be described and assessed as follows: • The UN is an important pillar of multilateral DC. The organization is endowed with some fundamental presuppositions (universality, a high level of legitimation, good...

For sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) the year 2005 offers a number of important opportunities for political action (G8 summit; debate on the report on the Commission for Africa – CFA; review of the progress made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals – MDGs). On the one hand, this is a chance...