Brigitte Weiffen

The Open University · Department of Politics and International Studies

While South America made significant strides in regional security cooperation since the 1990s, more recently the region seems to have entered a process of backsliding from its cooperative achievements and towards mere coexistence. This article proposes that an English School approach allows for a nuanced assessment of regional security cooperation....

This chapter sets the stage for the debates addressed in this volume’s special section on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and its effects on democratization or autocratization processes in recipient countries and societies since its establishment in 2013. After providing a brief overview of the expansion of the BRI and Chinese influence in Euras...

This chapter analyses the role of autocracy promotion in China’s grand strategy and the role of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in this context. Both the BRI and autocracy promotion can be considered tools Beijing uses to undermine the liberal international order. China does not engage in obvious activities to export its political system. Rather...

O presente relatório fornece uma visão geral dos tópicos que serão discutidos e pesquisados pelo grupo de trabalho “Democracia, Direitos Humanos e Justiça Internacional” do Módulo Jean Monnet FECAP. Após o fim da Guerra Fria e em meio a uma onda de transições do regime autoritário, acadêmicos, analistas políticos e formuladores de políticas, tanto...

Barely 15 years after the 2008 financial crisis and in a context of rising nationalism, regional organizations are facing multiple challenges. This article introduces an analytical framework that systematizes stressors and identifies characteristics that might help regional organizations to cope with stress. It draws on psychological models of how...

From a comparative perspective, the article analyzes the repercussions of the covid-19 pandemic for Latin American regionalism. It is based on an analytical framework to systematize the various challenges that may become stress factors for regionalism and identify the characteristics of a region that help explain how a region faces stress. Stressor...

Latin America was hit by COVID-19 in a moment of (socio-)economic distress and political unrest. This essay reflects on the immediate repercussions of the COVID-19 crisis for democracy in the region. It expounds how responding to the pandemic put to the test the still consolidating democracies with their long-standing defects in the areas of politi...

The article explores how power shifts in world politics and the emergence of regional powers affect regional security governance. We identify the post-Soviet space and Latin America as two regions where a traditional hegemon and Cold War superpower (the United States and Russia, respectively) has recently been challenged by a rising power (Brazil a...

The article explores how power shifts in world politics and the emergence of regional powers affect regional security governance. We identify the post-Soviet space and Latin America as two regions where a traditional hegemon and Cold War superpower (the United States and Russia, respectively) has recently been challenged by a rising power (Brazil a...

The handbook ‘Lateinamerika’ presents basic terms, political, economic, social and legal problems, and topics relating to and challenges faced by Latin America and its heterogeneous national realities. It also regards itself as obligated to area studies by presenting and understanding the aforementioned terms in their regional context. It provides...

Das Konzept der Transitional Justice bezeichnet das ganze Spektrum der Bemühungen um eine Aufarbeitung von Menschenrechtsverbrechen. Es hat seit seiner Entstehung eine immense Ausweitung der damit verbundenen Ansprüche und Ziele erfahren, was daran liegt, dass es in mehrfacher Hinsicht unpräzise ist. Weder der Ausdruck „justice“ noch der Ausdruck „...

Following the end of the Cold War, post-conflict democratisation has rarely occurred without a significant international involvement. This contribution argues that an explanation of the outcomes of post-conflict democratisation requires more than an examination of external actors, their mission mandates or their capabilities and deficiencies. In ad...

Latin American security is still viewed through a Cold War lens. Yet, the regional scenario has changed since then and is characterized by developments like the disengagement of the United States, the emergence of ‘regional powers’, the creation of ever more multilateral security institutions, and new interpretations of the concepts of regionalism...

The current regional security architecture in South America is characterized by a proliferation of institutions. Most regional organizations have by now adopted mechanisms to respond to domestic political crises and unconstitutional changes of government. This chapter studies whether overlapping mandates and activities in the management of politica...

This volume explores the repercussions of a changing world order on regional security in Latin America. It examines how global and regional power shifts impact on the evolution of regional institutions as well as on state policies adopted in response to regional security challenges such as border conflicts, political instability, migration, drug-tr...

Das Konzept der Transitional Justice bezeichnet das ganze Spektrum der Bemühungen um eine Aufarbeitung von Menschenrechtsverbrechen. Es hat seit seiner Entstehung eine immense Ausweitung der damit verbundenen Ansprüche und Ziele erfahren, was daran liegt, dass es in mehrfacher Hinsicht unpräzise ist. Weder der Ausdruck „justice“ noch der Ausdruck „...

Nach Kriegen und Diktaturen stellt der Umgang mit gewaltsamer Vergangenheit eine Herausforderung für Transformationsgesellschaften dar. Für die Aufarbeitung schwerer und systematischer Menschenrechtsverletzungen ist der Begriff Transitional Justice gebräuchlich. Der Generalsekretär der Vereinten Nationen beschreibt das Konzept in seinem Bericht übe...

A. Franco, N. Malhotra, and G. Simonovits (“Publication bias in the social sciences: Unlocking the file drawer,” Reports, 19 September, p. [1502][1]) present convincing evidence of publication bias in the social sciences. Encouraging publication of negative results will indeed benefit the

This volume examines the promotion and defense of democracy in the Americas. Taking the Inter-American Democratic Charter (IADC) of 2001 as a baseline it charts the evolution of the issue over the past decade. Although it considers historical antecedents, the main focus of the book is on key instances of promotion and defense of democracy in the We...

Since the year 2000, several South American countries strongly invested in armaments. At the same time, they increasingly resorted to diplomacy and cooperative institutions to maintain peace. This paper establishes a nexus between motivations for re-armament and recent debates on regional security governance and the emergence of regional powers. Mo...

The Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) has positioned itself as a regional security organization aimed at reducing the influence of the Organization of American States (OAS) in South America. At the same time, the OAS paradoxically serves as a model for UNASUR because of its operational capacity and its legitimacy as a regional organization....

Until now, democracy research has hardly looked into how the handling of the previous regime’s human rights violations affects the ability of young democracies to consolidate. The article supports the assumption that the search for truth and justice only influences certain democratic partial regimes, and focuses on the Rule of Law dimension. While...

This article follows the recent trend of bringing the Organization of American States (OAS) back into the debate on regional security, previously dominated by the accomplishments of European institutions and the shortcomings of their Asian and African counterparts. The study of the OAS is advanced here through application of an analytical framework...

Abstract Research linking heterogeneity and democracy usually focuses on one single dimension of heterogeneity, such as the distribution of power resources, income inequality, gender inequality, or ethnic fractionalization. Empirical results have so far been inconsistent. This article attempts a sound conceptualization of the phenomenon of heteroge...

This contribution focuses on the way the state and the international community deal with the legacy of a violent past after repressive dictatorships or civil wars. During the 1980s and the early 1990s, attempts to institutionalize memory and to come to terms with the past in the transitional period after the collapse of repressive authoritarian reg...

The fact that democracies maintain peaceful relations with each other is regarded as one of the few law-like correlations in international relations, but the causes of this empirical phenomenon remain contested. This paper tries to fill this theoretical gap by attributing the remarkable stability between democracies to inter-democratic institutions...

Bislang hat sich die Demokratieforschung kaum damit auseinandergesetzt, in welcher Weise sich der Umgang mit unter dem Vorgängerregime begangenen Menschenrechtsverletzungen auf die Konsolidierungschancen einer jungen Demokratie auswirkt. Der Beitrag vertritt die These, dass die Suche nach Wahrheit und Gerechtigkeit lediglich einzelne Teildimensione...

Der Bürgerkrieg ist nicht einfach als Gegensatz zum Staatenkrieg zu verstehen, und eine Theorie dieser Konfliktform gibt es nicht. Wie Gesellschaften auch unter den Bedingungen des Bürgerkrieges funktionieren, ist kaum erforscht. Die Herausgeberinnen des Bandes gehen davon aus, dass Bürgerkriege nicht nur die Grundlagen des gesellschaftlichen Zusa...

Beginning in the mid to late 1980’s, democracy took root in most countries in the Western hemisphere. This development in conjunction with the end of the Cold War led to a revival of the OAS and the initiation of new regional security institutions. The strategic framework of the Cold War had consisted in the perception of a threat outside the hemis...

The absence of war between democracies is regarded as one of the few law-like correlations in international relations. The causation of this empirical phenomenon, however, remains contested; and the democratic peace in search of its cause. The project tries to fill this theoretical gap by arguing that inter-democratic institutions are causally resp...

Seit den 1980er Jahren, und verstärkt nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauer und dem Zusammenbruch des kommunistischen Regimes in der Sowjetunion, wurden in vielen Staaten auf der ganzen Welt autokratische Herrscher von demokratisch gewählten Regierungen abgelöst. Diese Entwicklungen spiegeln sich in international vergleichenden Demokratiemessungen wider...

Welche Bedingungen förderlich und welche hinderlich für Demokratien sind, wird von den Sozialwissenschaften schon seit Längerem untersucht. Vor dem Hintergrund der wachsenden internationalen Vernetzung im wirtschaftlichen, politischen und gesellschaftlichen Bereich muss die Frage nach den Bedingungen, unter denen sich die demokratische Staatsform a...

Summary From an international comparative perspective, the stability of autocratic regimes in the countries of the Gulf region is striking. This paper presents historical-cultural as well as economic explanations and proposes that the interaction of both factors constitutes a cultural-economic syndrome accounting for the persistence of authoritaria...

Taking democratic peace theory as a starting point, this paper explores how two Kantian articles, joint democracy and international institutions, reinforce each other. Even if international institutions as such may not be able to influence the conflict behavior of their member-states, the subgroup of interdemocratic institutions is well suited to r...

Beginning in the mid to late 1980's, democracy took root in most countries in the Western hemisphere. This development in conjunction with the end of the Cold War led to a revival of the OAS and the initiation of new regional security institutions. The strategic framework of the Cold War had consisted in the perception of a threat outside the hemis...

Do academic publication standards reflect or determine research results? The article proposes minimal criteria for distinguishing useful ‘unpublishable’ results from low-quality research, and argues that the virtues of negative results have been overlooked. We consider the fate these results have suffered thus far, review arguments for and against...

The international organisation of the democratic peace matters. Interdemocratic institutions are particularly suited to block escalation pathways between states and to prevent conflicts from resulting in war. This article builds on findings from three fields of research: (a) the liberal analysis of the democratic peace; (b) systemic approaches to i...

Die weltweite Ausbreitung der Demokratie hat zu einer intensiven theoretischen und empirischen Beschäftigung mit den Funktionsvoraussetzungen von Demokratie, dem Verlauf von Demokratisierungsprozessen und den Garanten demokratischer Stabilität geführt. Allerdings konzentriert sich die Mehrzahl der Studien zu den Bedingungen demokratischer Entwicklu...

Compared to other world regions, the Middle East is exceptional in its resistance to democratization. Whereas a cultural explanation for this democracy gap refers to historical legacies, especially to the dominant role of Islam, an economic explanation emphasizes oil wealth as the main barrier to democracy. According to various quantitative studies...