Volume 04, Issue 3, Fall 2013

Rémy M. Mauduit
 
Simply put, the concept of governance - the lawful control over the affairs of a political unit, such as a nation - describes certain forms of interaction between the state and society. Good governance recognizes the integrity, rights, and needs of everyone within the state. It offers a way of managing power and policy, while government serves as an instrument to do so.

Patrick O. Asingo, PhD 
 
Two decades after the onset of the third wave of democratization, the African political landscape is still replete with dominant parties operating within the framework of competitive multiparty systems. Some of these parties seem so entrenched that even relatively free competitive elections have not been able to shake their political bases. Botswana, for example, is widely regarded as "the longest-enduring and most stable liberal democracy in (Southern) Africa." Yet, despite this impressive record of democracy, the Botswana Democratic Party has won all successive elections and has ruled the country since independence in 1965.

Susan L. Sakmar, JD, LLM  
 
The forces of globalization during the past two decades have been particularly powerful, but for many reasons, countries in the Arab region have not participated in globalization to the extent found in other parts of the world. Whereas most areas worldwide experienced a significant increase in global trade as a percentage of total gross domestic product (GDP) between 1980 and 2004, trade ratios in the Arab region actually declined during that period.

Col Géraud Laborie, French Air Force
 
On 10 November 2001, Northern Alliance forces captured Mazar-i-Sharif, thereby accelerating the fall of the Taliban regime one month later. With this significant victory (the first since the beginning of Operation Enduring Freedom), the entire world saw images of Western horse-mounted military in the midst of cavalry commanded by Gen Abdul Rashid Dostum, Afghan warlord and US ally during the operation.

Shaukat Ansari
 
South Africa’s transition from a racially exclusive apartheid state to a liberal democracy - referred to as a “double transition” to denote the economic dynamics behind the political transformation - has attracted the attention of a substantial number of researchers from a variety of disciplines. The topic of radical transformation in the African National Congress’s (ANC) official position on state developmental policy has aroused perhaps the greatest interest among scholars.

Oumar Ba 
 
On 9 July 2011, the Republic of South Sudan became an independent country. This redrawing of the African map represents just one of very few instances of such an occurrence five decades after the independence years and of a conflict with a secessionist agenda leading to the birth a new state. A growing body of literature holds that Africa has a "secessionist deficit" and that the "weak sovereignty equilibrium" of its states hinders the continent's stability and development.

Barah Mikaïl, PhD
 
Islamist parties, excluded from the political sphere for much of the last decade, are now coming to the forefront of Arab politics. The electoral victories of Ennahda in Tunisia and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt suggest that the future of Arab politics will be dominated by decision makers with faith-based political agendas. But the part that religion should play in the new political orders of Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and how its involvement might be shaped in law and practice, remain the subject of controversy and debate.