Research at the ISID is intended to contribute directly to understanding the foundations of democratic governance. To an unprecedented degree, achieving democratic governance where it does not exist and improving its quality where it does have become dominant goals at all levels, from the local to the global. Yet it is not clear whether there is just one form of democratic rule, or if there is not, what qualities all democracies must share. For many new democracies, there is also a growing concern over the apparent inability of elected governments to effectively respond to citizens’ most urgent needs. However valued democracy may be in the abstract, the perceived ineffectiveness of actual democratic governments threatens to lead people to question its relevance to the most pressing issues of the day. This larger question, in turn, will be approached in terms of three distinct axes or research clusters.
Research Clusters
- 1) Economic Development and Living Standards: Experience has shown that economic development requires economic growth, and we are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of how wealth created through growth is actually distributed and affects living standards. At the same time, the globalized economy has created new opportunities and challenges for sustained growth, and countries have committed themselves through the Millennium Development Goals to a major reduction in poverty by 2015. Research in this cluster would revolve around the factors contributing to the improvement of standards of living and sustained economic growth, the trade-offs associated with different ways of achieving growth and poverty reduction, and the distributional issues that development inevitably raises. More generally, research in this cluster will also be concerned with understanding how the process of economic development unfolds under different conditions and circumstances and the implications for human well-being.
- 2) States and State Institutions: Many states enforce the rule of law, guide the economy, provide diverse public goods, and therefore promote broad-based development. Yet some states are unable to effectively promote development, others are used by political officials to terrorize and prey on society, and still others have failed and collapsed. Such variation across the developing world calls for deeper analysis of the ways in which states affect developmental processes, the origins of different state structures, and the possibility of building more developmental states. Also worthy of increased attention is the relationship between state power and issues of identity and ideology, specifically nationalism, religion, ethnicity, and cultural hegemony. How does the state manage or manipulate ethnic and religious conflict? How do state elites shape norms and values that we take for granted in society?
- 3) Civil Society: Identity, Diversity, and the Mediation of Difference: Within nation-states and local communities, individuals and groups continuously struggle to negotiate their relationships with the state and with each other in ways that may challenge conventional or legal definitions of citizenship. In regions where certain social actors must deal with entrenched social inequities that are the legacy of colonialism, they seek rights and access to resources that continue to be denied to them. Across the globe, people draw on identities that currently may involve revised configurations of ethnicity, race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, and politics, to demand social justice from oppositional entities, which may include nation-states, legal and political institutions, or even other members of civil society. Such collective identities may exacerbate struggles between groups, but they may also create linkages, both within and across nation-states, to form social movements that challenge current inequalities. Particular contentious issues that members of civil society currently confront include, but are not limited to, political violence, ethnic conflict, environmental degradation, human rights, corruption, gender inequity and political or historical restitution. As people confront these issues and renegotiate their citizenship rights, they become both embedded in and inseparable from the democratization process.