Настоящая работа посвящена анализу существующих теорий демократии. Сделан научный анализ многочисленных источников, начиная с античных философов и заканчивая современными учеными политологами. Оказалось, что разные виды демократий могут отличаться друг от друга в большей степени, чем одна форма государственного правления от другой. Демократии в разных странах носят ярко выраженный национальный характер и не могут рассматриваться в отрыве от традиционной культуры народа, который выбрал демократическую форму правления в своем государстве. В книге приведена и критика демократии. В качестве критических источников также выбраны наиболее авторитетные авторы, никак не ангажированные какими бы то ни было политическими силами. В заключительной части книги приведены возможные варианты развития событий в России, дана характеристика существующего социально экономического положения и предложены пути реализации Национальной идеи Русского государства. Книга предназначена для широкого круга читателей и может быть использована как в виде учебного пособия, так и для научного обоснования выбора Россией дальнейшего пути развития.

Breaking new ground in scholarship, Niraja Jayal writes the first history of citizenship in the largest democracy in the world—India. Unlike the mature democracies of the west, India began as a true republic of equals with a complex architecture of citizenship rights that was sensitive to the many hierarchies of Indian society. In this provocative biography of the defining aspiration of modern India, Jayal shows how the progressive civic ideals embodied in the constitution have been challenged by exclusions based on social and economic inequality, and sometimes also, paradoxically, undermined by its own policies of inclusion. Citizenship and Its Discontents explores a century of contestations over citizenship from the colonial period to the present, analyzing evolving conceptions of citizenship as legal status, as rights, and as identity. The early optimism that a new India could be fashioned out of an unequal and diverse society led to a formally inclusive legal membership, an impulse to social and economic rights, and group-differentiated citizenship. Today, these policies to create a civic community of equals are losing support in a climate of social intolerance and weak solidarity. Once seen by Western political scientists as an anomaly, India today is a site where every major theoretical debate about citizenship is being enacted in practice, and one that no global discussion of the subject can afford to ignore.

Before democracy becomes an institutionalised form of political authority, the rupture with authoritarian forms of power causes deep uncertainty about power and outcomes. This book connects the study of democratisation in eastern Europe and Russia to the emergence and crisis of communism. Wydra argues that the communist past is not simply a legacy but needs to be seen as a social organism in gestation, where critical events produce new expectations, memories, and symbols that influence meanings of democracy. By examining a series of pivotal historical events, he shows that democratisation is not just a matter of institutional design, but rather a matter of consciousness and leadership under conditions of extreme and traumatic incivility. Rather than adopting the opposition between non-democratic and democratic, Wydra argues that the communist experience must be central to the study of the emergence and nature of democracy in (post-) communist countries.

When a popular revolt forced long-ruling Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to resign on February 11, 2011, U.S. President Barack Obama hailed the victory of peaceful demonstrators in the heart of the Arab World. But Washington was late to endorse democracy - for decades the United States favored Egypt's rulers over its people. Since 1979, the United States had provided the Egyptian regime more than $60 billion in aid and immeasurable political support to secure its main interests in the region: Israeli security and strong relations with Persian Gulf oil producers. During the Egyptian uprising, the White House did not promote popular sovereignty but instead backed an "orderly transition" to one of Mubarak's cronies. Even after protesters derailed that plan, the anti-democratic U.S.-Egyptian alliance continued. Using untapped primary materials, this book helps explain why authoritarianism has persisted in Egypt with American support, even as policy makers claim to encourage democratic change.

Only one country in the world--Switzerland--is a direct democracy, in which, to an extent, the people pass their own laws, judge the constitutionality of statutes, and even have written, in effect, their own constitution. In this propitious volume, Gregory Fossedal reports on the politics and social fabric of what James Bryce has called "the nation that has taken the democratic idea to its furthest extent." The lessons Fossedal presents, at a time of dissatisfaction with the role of money and privileged elites in many Western democracies, are at once timely and urgent. In Direct Democracy in Switzerland, Fossedal has developed a shrewd, sensitive overview of Switzerland's high notion of statecraft. He details the reasons for studying Switzerland's distinctive institutions, and explores the origins and development of the ancient Swiss democracy, which reaches back a thousand years. He shows how Switzerland handles the political questions common to all modern societies, such as education, taxes, crime, welfare, the Holocaust. He concludes with the ongoing debate over two very different visions of democracy, direct versus representative. Paolo Dardenelli in Regional and Federal Studies described the book in its cloth edition as offering "many valuable insights into Swiss political life and written in a light, refreshing journalistic style." Amity Shlaes of the Financial Times commented that "Fossedal shines a brilliant spotlight on a form of governancewith lessons for the rest of us. His review of the referendum process there is required reading for lawmakers, political consultants and voters." Gregory A. Fossedal is chairman of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a research foundation based near Washington, DC. He is also president and chief investment officer of the Democratic Century Fund and its management company, the Emerging Markets Group. He is author of The Democratic Imperative. Alfred R. Berkeley III is president of the Nasdaq stock market.

For the People is a historical docutext that examines the evolution of the struggle for peace and justice in America's past, from pre-colonial times to the present. Each chapter begins with a brief historical introduction followed by a series of primary source documents and questions to encourage student comprehension. Sample photographs illustrate the range of peace activists' concerns, while the list of references, focused on the most important works in the field of U.S. peace history, points students toward opportunities for further research. This is the only historical docutext specifically devoted to peace issues. The interpretive analysis of American peace history provided by the editors makes this more than just an anthology of collected documents. As such, the docutext is an extension and a complement to the editors' recently published popular scholarly survey, A History of the American Peace Movement from Colonial Times to the Present. A central idea in this work is that peace is more than just the absence of war. The documents, and the analysis that accompanies them, offer fresh perspectives on the ways in which the peace movement became transformed from one simply opposing war to one proclaiming the importance of social, political, and economic equality. The editors' premise is that the peace movement historically has been a collective attempt by numerous well-intentioned people to improve American society. The book illuminates the ways in which peace activists were often connected to larger reform movements in American history, including those that fought for the rights of working people, for women's equality, and for the abolition of slavery, to name just a few. With a focus on those who spoke out for peace, this docutext is designed to call to students' attention one of the least discussed classroom subjects in American education today. Students in secondary school Social Studies and American history classes as well as those taking college level courses in U.S. history, American Studies, or Peace Studies will find this work an excellent supplementary reader.

Democracy in Europe has been a recent phenomenon. Only in the wake of World War II were democratic frameworks secured, and, even then, it was decades before democracy truly blanketed the continent. Neither given nor granted, democracy requires conflict, often violent confrontations, and challenges to the established political order. In Europe, Geoff Eley convincingly shows, democracy did not evolve organically out of a natural consensus, the achievement of prosperity, or the negative cement of the Cold War. Rather, it was painstakingly crafted, continually expanded, and doggedly defended by varying constellations of socialist, feminist, Communist, and other radical movements that originally blossomed in the later nineteenth century. Parties of the Left championed democracy in the revolutionary crisis after World War I, salvaged it against the threat of fascism, and renewed its growth after 1945. They organized civil societies rooted in egalitarian ideals which came to form the very fiber of Europe's current democratic traditions. The trajectories of European democracy and the history of the European Left are thus inextricably bound together. Geoff Eley has given us the first truly comprehensive history of the European Left--its successes and failures; its high watermarks and its low tides; its accomplishments, insufficiencies, and excesses; and, most importantly, its formative, lasting influence on the European political landscape. At a time when the Left's influence and legitimacy are frequently called into question, Forging Democracy passionately upholds its vital contribution.

Gene Sharp, an emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and founder of the Albert Einstein Institution, is widely credited as one of the principal initiators of the Arab Spring. His 1993 book, “From Dictatorship to Democracy,” which promotes the principle of nonviolent struggle, is created with inspiring the revolution in Egypt, as well as in other countries all over the world.

This is the first major study of revolutionary Kronstadt to span the period from February 1917 to the uprising of March 1921. It focuses attention on Kronstadt's forgotten golden age, between March 1917 and July 1918, when Soviet power and democracy flourished there. Professor Getzler argues that the Kronstadters' 'Third Revolution' of March 1921 was a desperate attempt at a restoration of that Soviet democracy which they believed had been taken from them by Bolshevik 'commissarocracy'. Pointing to continuity in personnel, ideology and institutions linking the 1917-18 Kronstadt experiment in Soviet democracy with the March 1921 uprising, the author sees that continuity reflected in the Kronstadt tragedy's central figure, the long-haired, dreamy-eyed student Anatolii Lamanov. Chairman of the Kronstadt Soviet in 1917 and chief editor of its Izvestiia, Lamanov became the ideologist of the 1921 uprising and was soon after executed as a 'counter-revolutionary'.

Norway is by history and culture very much a Scandinavian nation with its own unique profile. This book analyzes the factors that have shaped the sociocultural fabric of Norwegian politics. One of the most important themes Heidar analyzes is the power of the periphery, both in social as well as geographic terms. In the geographic sense, Norway is a small nation, and although it has been able to remain economically and politically stable, it is situated on the European flank. It is therefore dependent upon and vulnerable to external economic and political developments. In critical periods of its history, Norway’s size has made it an object rather than an initiator of change. In the social sense, Norway has existed as a “periphery nation”.

Does democracy reduce state repression as human rights activism, funding, and policy suggest? What are the limitations of this argument? Investigating 137 countries from 1976 to 1996, State Repression and the Domestic Democratic Peace seeks to shed light on these questions. Specifically, it finds that electoral participation and competition generally reduces personal integrity violations like torture and mass killing; other aspects of democracy do not wield consistent influences. This negative influence can be overwhelmed by conflict, however, and thus there are important qualifications for the peace proposition.