India’s Endangered Democracy

Indias last bastion of polio at "tipping point".

Endangered languages, endangered knowledge

ogist, and ethnobiologist. She is cofounder and President of Terralingua: Partnerships for Linguistic and Biological Diversity. Terralingua is an international NGO based in Washington, DC, devoted to supporting the world’s linguistic diversity and to exploring the links between linguistic, cultural, and biological diversity, through research, information, education, and policy. She is editor of...

Does democracy assistance promote democracy?

1 Democracy assistance may contribute to democratisation in a number of ways. It can channel support for elections, it can strengthen legislatures and judiciaries by creating checks and balances on the executive and other bodies, and it can promote democratic participation by strengthening civil society organisations, among others. Against a background of growing concern for democracy worldwide...

Endangered species and endangered knowledge

The recent discovery of a new species of land iguana in the Galapagos (Tzika et al. 2008; Gentile et al. 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009) is indeed an exciting novelty, of great interest to all zoologists and evolutionary biologists. This species being apparently represented only by a very small population with a very limited range, it was described as a new taxon following an unusual procedure: no ...

From Managed Democracy to Sovereign Democracy

The first year of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s second term has been disastrous. A series of crises has occurred, from the assassination of Chechen President Akhmad Kadyrov in Grozny in May 2004, to the widespread demonstrations against the government’s seriously flawed attempt to replace social and other benefits with cash payments. Fighters staged raids in Grozny and Ingushetia, the gove...