faculty research workshops Laurie Brand, the Robert Grandford Wright Professor of International Relations and Middle East Studies at the University of Southern California, delivered a CIRS Monthly Dialogue on “The Politics of National Narratives: The Evolution of ‘Revolution’ in Egypt” on March 23, 2015. The talk reflected some of the main themes presented in her recent book, Official Stories: ...

Explanations of the emergence of regional autonomy movements political organizations seeking to express sub-state affinities and interests often highlight cultural differences and economic incentives as important reasons driving regional elites and local politicians to form such organization and explain the support regional autonomy movements receive. In this paper I employ a specialized agent-...

Most studies of political blogging have focused exclusively on the so-called “A-list” political blogs. While these studies have provided important insights into the content of A-list political blogs (Adamic and Glance, 2005), how A-list political blogs influence media coverage (Drezner and Farrell, 2004) and who A-list political bloggers are (McKenna and Pole, 2004), they have largely ignored t...

When do labor laws protect workers from workplace risks, and when do they serve to institute or insulate the privilege of particular political and economic actors? This paper argues that Latin American labor laws are highly politicized, and have been since their early origins. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the first labor codes were formulated to favor skilled, unionized labor ...

MUNICIPAL GOVERNMENTS ARE THE SMALLEST AND MOST BASIC UNIT OF representative democracy (Dahl and Tufte 1973, 13). Politicians serving in these governments—mayors and members of municipal assemblies—perform important functions in the policy process by meeting residents on a regular basis, discussing policy matters with them, and making policy decisions that affect the communities in which they r...

The global health agenda has been dominating the current global health policy debate. Furthermore, it has compelled countries to embrace strategies for tackling health inequalities in a wide range of public health areas. The article by Robert and colleagues highlights that although globalization has increased opportunities to share and spread ideas, there is still great asymmetry of power accor...

I ndigenous peoples in Latin America dispatched the twentieth century as they did the eighteenth, with a wave of social mobilizations that frightened elites and dramatically altered the political possibilities for a democratizing and modernizing continent. In the 1780s, the Aymara, Quechua, and mestizo armies of Túpaj Katari and Túpac Amaru initiated what some have called the “first war of inde...

There seems to be a debate on the validity of democratic peace theory. Whilst, some scholars and schools of thought have argued that democracy engenders peace, others have argued exactly the opposite. In the Nigerian context, democracy appears to have been characterized by violence, this paper examines democracy and violent conflicts and in origins and its implications for development with a pa...

Past research using self-report questionnaires administered to ordinary citizens demonstrates that value priorities differ as a function of one’s political ideology, but it is unclear whether this conclusion applies to political elites, who are presumably seeking to appeal to very broad constituencies. We used quantitative methods of textual analysis to investigate value-laden language in a col...