The 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq transformed Iraq’s political settlement by ejecting the previous elites from power and by initiating state-building processes with previously marginalised elites and different governance principles. Iraq’s current day elites and institutions are the inheritors of that process. This review summarises the post-2003 processes that structure the ...» more
Political parties
Dominant party systems and development programming
There is a lack of applied thinking or rigorous empirical investigation into how donors and the international community can work with dominant party systems to promote more responsive state-society relations, or other forms of development progress. Frequently cited examples of existing research are not based on recent, systematic comparative research and focus mainly on ...» more
Factors supporting the emergence of democracies
This review of empirical case studies in this report suggests that, rather than a single theory to explain democratic transitions, a combination is usually applicable. In all cases it was a mix of factors that supported the emergence of democracies, due to time frames (some short-term, some long-standing) and also origin (some domestic, some external). This report draws on the ...» more
Political economy of conflicts in Kyrgyzstan since the 2000s
A fundamental finding, widely shared among authors, is that it is not only the national level that matters, but also regional and local ones, in violent and non-violent conflicts. In recent and older history, local conflicts sometime develop into national ones. Other key findings of the literature review include: The root causes of both conflicts are largely similar and ...» more
Political systems
Political systems are the formal and informal political processes by which decisions are made concerning the use, production and distribution of resources in any given society. Formal political institutions can determine the process for electing leaders; the roles and responsibilities of the executive and legislature; the organisation of political representation (through ...» more
