In the last ten years, economic issues related to currency policy have become the major ongoing dispute between China and the U.S. Especially the U.S. Congress is stridently demanding a tougher policy to avert the negative consequences for the U.S. economy of "unfair" Chinese policies in the...

Interdependence, collective identities and common institutions are the preconditions for the evolution of a pluralistic security community. While the interaction of the states of Southern Latin America already meets the first two criteria, this article focuses on the third one, particularly the...

Half a century after independence, African elites, at least those in conflict-ridden countries, often live in constant fear for their life. Real or invented coup attempts, political assassinations, beatings of opposition leaders, the distribution of death lists, etc. have a profoundly...

The present article illustrates how the main actors in global health governance (GHG)— governments, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), intergovernmental organizations (IOs), and transnational pharmaceutical companies (TNPCs)—have been interacting and, as a result, modifying the global...

This paper contributes to providing insights into the impact of decentralisation on poverty. It starts out with an overview of which role decentralisation plays in strategies and policies for poverty eradication and derives economic and political impact channels. It concentrates on the economic...

Crime, violence, and insecurity are among the most important social topics in contemporary Costa Rica. These three issues play a central role in the media, politics, and everyday life, and the impression has emerged that security has changed for the worse and that society is now threatened...

This paper analyzes the role of ethnicity in shaping the character of Kenya’s political parties and its party system since 1992. Drawing on a constructivist conception of ethnicity, it uses a framework of comparison derived from Donald Horowitz and distinguishes between three party types: the...

The institutionalization of political parties is said to be important for democratic development, but its measurement has remained a neglected area of research. We understand the institutionalization of political organizations as progress in four dimensions: roots in society, level of...

The Chinese Communist Party has chosen to base the legitimacy of its rule on its performance as leading national power. Since national identity is based on shared imaginations of and directly tied to territory – hence place, this paper analyses both heterodox models for identification on the...

En este trabajo se analizan los “otros” objetivos que llevan a Chile y México a concretar TLCs intra o extra-regionales. Estos países tienen una motivación económica que predomina al momento de buscar estos acuerdos; sin embargo, existen otros elementos que son menos aparentes, pero...