News and Notes

Penn Kemble and the Legacy of Sidney Hook

On October 1, friends of Penn Kemble organized a conference that he had conceptualized on the political legacy of philosopher Sidney Hook. A luncheon address, "Defending American Values at Home and Abroad," was delivered by Jean Bethke Elshtain of the University of Chicago. Other sessions were devoted to "International Democracy and the New Totalitarianism"; "Liberty and Security: The Precarious Balance"; "Prospects for American Labor"; and "American Liberalism and the Legacy of Sidney Hook." A special concluding session consisted of tributes to the work of Penn Kemble, coeditor of the online publication Democracy Digest, former deputy director of the U.S. Information Agency, and longtime democratic activist, who died of brain cancer two weeks later on October 15. (A collection of obituaries for Kemble may be found at www.socialdemocrats.org/tribute.html). Panelists at the conference included Tom Donahue, Carl Gershman, Adrian Karatnycky, Joshua Muravchik, Morton Halperin, Michael Allen, Arch Puddington, Paul Berman, Rachelle Horowitz, Max Kampelman, Jeane Kirkpatrick, and Ben Wattenberg.

Human Rights Awards

At a November 6 ceremony in Bergen, Norway, the Thorolf Rafto Foundation for Human Rights awarded its 2005 Memorial Prize to Chechen lawyer Lida Yusupova for her work documenting human rights violations as head of the Grozny office of Memorial, one of the very few human rights organizations that continue to operate in Chechnya.

The European Parliament awarded its 2005 Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought to three recipients: The Cuban opposition movement Damas de Blanco (Women in White), which holds peaceful demonstrations against the detention of their husbands and sons for political reasons; Nigerian human rights lawyer Hauwa Ibrahim; and the international organization Reporters Without Borders, which campaigns for press freedom and defends journalists against censorship and harassment. The awards were scheduled to be presented in Strasbourg on December 14. 

Evaluating Democracy in Latin America

Latinobarómetro celebrated its tenth anniversary with a conference at Oxford University's Latin American Centre on September 19–20. Latinobarómetro, a nonprofit organization based in Santiago, Chile, has carried out regular surveys of opinions, attitudes, and values in Latin America since 1995. Participants included Latinobarómetro executive director Marta Lagos, Alfred Stepan of Columbia University, Laurence Whitehead of Oxford, Leonardo Morlino of the University of Florence, Michael Bratton of Michigan State University, and Doh Shin of the University of Missouri. For more information, see www.latinobarometro.org.

Lectures on Democracy

A number of notable lectures on democracy were held in Washington, D.C., and New York City:

The second annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture on Democracy in the World was presented at the Canadian Embassy in Washington on November 2 by Francis Fukuyama of the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), on the topic "Identity, Immigration, and Liberal Democracy." An earlier version of the lecture was presented on October 19 at the Munk Centre for International Studies of the University of Toronto, which cosponsors the annual Lipset Lecture with the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).

On November 15–17, Nobel Prize-winning economist and Harvard University professor Amartya Sen delivered a series of three lectures entitled "The Foundations of Democracy," hosted by the Bernard L. Schwartz Forum on Constructive Capitalism at SAIS.

The New York Democracy Forum, a joint venture between the NED and the Foreign Policy Association, organized three lectures. On October 6, Mark Malloch Brown, chef de cabinet to UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and former UNDP administrator, spoke on "UN Reform, Democracy, and Human Rights." On November 3, Larry Diamond, coeditor of the Journal of Democracy, addressed the question, "Can the Whole World Become Democratic?" And on December 1, former Malaysian deputy prime minister Anwar Ibrahim discussed "The Future of Muslim Democracy."

CDATS to Offer New Democracy Degree

The Center for Democracy and the Third Sector (CDATS) and the Department of Government at Georgetown University have created a new master's degree program in democracy studies that will commence in the academic year 2006–2007. CDATS also launched a new lecture series, cosponsored by the Ratiu Family Charitable Foundation, in memory of prominent Romanian philanthropist and statesman Ion Ratiu. The first Ion Ratiu...