Summary
Contents
Subject index
This major textbook provides a clear and comprehensive introduction to the main analytical approaches and their use in the study of third world politics and development. The author outlines the difficulties in the various analytical approaches to the study of development within political science; presents a critical overview of each of the main schools of thought and explores the contemporary issue of democratization to illustrate how students can apply a framework for research and critically develop a perspective on their own.
From Civil Society and Social Capital to the Politics of Democratisation
From Civil Society and Social Capital to the Politics of Democratisation
The important but rather overlooked problems in the debate on democratisation that we pointed to in Chapter 12 have one common denominator: they all require that we look at democracy in more depth, at its basic building blocks. So the next question is, how do we actually go about studying the process of democratisation from below?1
As we know, the paradigm in vogue is of civil society, and of civic community generating social capital. Is this relevant and fruitful? I do not think so. I shall dispute the paradigm in four sections: first by recalling its general theoretical weaknesses; second by questioning its relevance in ...
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