News and Notes
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Seventh Annual Lipset Lecture
Ivan Krastev, chairman of the board of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria, delivered the seventh annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., on October 19. The lecture was also given at the Centre for International Studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto on October 20. An article based on the lecture, which was entitled “Paradoxes of the New Authoritarianism,” will be published in the April 2011 issue of the Journal of Democracy.
Ion Ratiu Lecture
On December 2, the European Studies program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars held the sixth annual Ion Ratiu Democracy Award lecture. Oleg Kozlovsky, a political activist and cofounder of the Solidarnost United Democratic Movement in Russia, received the Ion Ratiu Democracy Award and then delivered a keynote address on “Democracy: New Tools for the Struggle.” Comments were offered by Daniel B. Baer, deputy-assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights, and labor; Robert Guerra, director of the Internet Freedom project at Freedom House; and Egyptian democracy activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim, the 2006 Ion Ratiu Award Recipient.
NED’s International Forum
On September 16, the Forum and NED’s Europe Program organized a roundtable entitled “Making Bosnia and Herzegovina Work: A Path to a Functioning Democracy.” Academic experts on comparative constitutional design, along with legal and country specialists, discussed how Bosnia and Herzegovina can [End Page 187] strengthen its democratic institutions and prepare for eventual accession to Euro-Atlantic institutions. The discussion focused on the state of governance and democracy in the country and on the necessary changes and possible alternatives for constitutional reform. Participants included Benjamin Reilly of SAIS, Andrew Reynolds of the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), and James C. O’Brien of the Albright Stonebridge Group. The conference report is available at www.ned.org/sites/default/files/Bosnia%20report.pdf.
On September 30, the Forum and the Center for International Private Enterprise cosponsored a presentation entitled “Merchants of Modernity: Business, Development, and Democracy in Developing Countries,” featuring Ann Bernstein, executive director of the Centre for Development and Enterprise in South Africa. The event also marked the publication of her new book The Case for Business in Developing Economies.
On October 7, the Journal of Democracy cosponsored a panel discussion at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace entitled “The Elusive Synthesis: Exploring the Changing Relationship Between Democracy Support and Development Aid.” The discussion, based on a set of articles in the October 2010 issue of the Journal, featured authors Thomas Carothers, vice-president for studies at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; K. Scott Hubli, director of governance programs at the National Democratic Institute; and Brian Levy, an advisor on public-sector governance at the World Bank. The event also celebrated the publication of Debates on Democratization, a new Journal of Democracy book published by the Johns Hopkins University Press.
On November 5–6, the Ecuadorian civil society organization Grupo Faro hosted a conference in Quito entitled “Political Clientelism, Social Policy, and the Quality of Democracy: Evidence from Latin America, Lessons from Other Regions.” The meeting was cosponsored by the Forum (as the secretariat of the Network of Democracy Research Institutes) and by Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law. Funders included the Ford Foundation and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. Among the panelists were Victoria Murillo of Columbia University, Paul Hutchcroft of the Australian National University, Nicolas van de Walle of Cornell University, and Juan Pablo Luna of the Catholic University of Chile.
In October, the Forum welcomed a new group of Reagan-Fascell Democracy Fellows: Dayo Aiyetan (Nigeria), Arturo Alvarado (Mexico), Levan Berdzenishvili (Georgia), Anton Burkov (Russia), Roukaya Kasenally (Mauritius), and Yanhai Wan (China). They will be in residence through February 2011.
On December 9, Roukaya Kasenally, senior lecturer in media and political systems at the University of Mauritius, gave a presentation entitled “From Postcard to Scorecard: Assessing the Quality of Democracy in Mauritius.” [End Page 188]
