Security concerns increasingly influence foreign aid: how Western countries give aid, to whom and why. With contributions from experts in the field, this book examines the impact of security issues on six of the world's largest aid donors, as well as on key crosscutting issues such as gender...

Social protection can be defined as "policies and actions which enhance the capacity of poor and vulnerable people to escape from poverty and enable them to better manage risks and shocks" (OECD/DAC 2009, 10). The term would thus include social insurance, social transfers and minimum labour...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) are going to expire at the end of 2015r; and the United Nations are currently negotiating a new development agenda for the coming years. The proposal for ‘Sustainable Development Goals' submitted by the Open Working Group (OWG) in 2014 serves as a...

Researchers, policymakers and the representatives of international organisations increasingly use the term “social contract” to describe relations between societal groups and a state. The United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, for example, has declared that “now is the time to renew the...

The worldwide wave of autocratization is doing away with many of the democratic achievements made since 1989. Scholarship on international democracy promotion is yet to theorise how democracy can be protected from autocratization. Such a theory must account for different democratic and...