Mandy @ POLI 333D

“A riot police officers tries to extinguish flames from a petrol bomb thrown by protestors outside the Greek parliament, in Athens on Sunday, Feb. 12, 2012. (AP Photo/Thanassis Stavrakis)”   From  macleans.ca “Week in Pictures” It is worth contemplating whether a democratic choice is the best choice for Greece, which has been spending profligately on economic and […]

“Global citizenship” has been a fashionable term for a while, despite its meaning and practicability are still debatable. According to Derek Heater, any global citizenship will have to be based on some version of “multiple citizenship” rather than one.  The basic building block will remain the local or provincial one, followed by that of the […]

Taliban revealed that they had talked with the U.S. but refused to negotiate with the Afghan government. It is apparent that the U.S. is a bargaining chip for the Taliban to maintain its bases in Afghanistan. I wonder if successful negotiations between the U.S. and the Taliban will facilitate democratic transition in Afghanistan……when the role of the Afghan government is […]

Conceptualization of Democracy For the purpose of assessing the measures of democracy for the Southeast Asian countries (which include Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam), this report conceptualizes democracy according to two components of democracy, namely competitions and majority rule. As such, a country will be categorized as democratic if its governing body makes […]

This is a coincidence that I am also looking at MetaCritic as did Prof. Nyblade, and comparing its rating for music albums with that of NME. COM (New Musical Express), the official website of the British music publication NME. On NME.COM, site visitors (who don’t need to register as members) can rate an album by […]

“TAKE UP THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN, AND REAP HIS OLD REWARD.” In another class, I am asked to use Aristotle’s thought to analyze Ignatieff’s “The Burden” – in which he justifies American invasion in Iraq as a means to restore orders in dysfunctional states. This gets me to think about the antinomy between individual and […]

picture from The Guardian This article mentions not only the response of the public, but also of the internet companies, to India’s recent internet censorship. The article suggests, given India’s lucrative market, internet companies like Google would probably “kowtow to the government than risk abandoning a cash cow like India. (This is because) taking down a few […]

Hi guys, I am going to work on Southeast Asia, a region that is quite unfamiliar to me. I have plans to visit these countries through (particularly Cambodia), so I hope I can learn more about the region through this paper.

While democracy can be simply defined by four words: “ruled by the people,” we all know it is more complex than that. I believe that such minimalistic definition of democracy is used to prevent contradictory interpretations of democracy resulted from different ways of conceptualization. As such, when we try to define democracy, we should keep in […]

The functioning of democracy largely depends on the definition of citizenship, which has become vaguer as more western democracies become inclusive of different linguistic and cultural communities. While democracy and multiculturalism themselves are not contradictory, their relationship can be complex.  In fact, little attention has been paid to the questions of whether democracy should support […]