In 2024, nearly half the world’s population, including citizens of the eight most populous nations, voted or will vote in elections. While this signals democratic engagement, many elections are run by autocratic or illiberal regimes pursuing self-serving agendas. Paradoxically thus, as elections are generalising as a practice, democracy is met with growing defiance. On closer scrutiny, however, it appears that it is not only the indicators of democracy but also those of elections that have been declining over the past decade. This dossier, produced with the Albert Hirschman Centre for Democracy, examines the essential role of elections in the construction of democracy today.
© Chappatte in NZZ am Sonntag, Zurich www.chappatte.com
We currently face a baffling paradox. While since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 a seemingly inexorable process of globalisation has been foreshadowing a peaceful and frontierless world, the number of walls across the world has been rising at a steady pace. Liberal and open societies buttressed by trade, international law and technological progress were supposed to implacably contribute to the erosion of frontiers and walls between nations. However, in a context of surging populist discourses, securitarian anxieties and identitarian politics as well as concomitant flows of migration alimented by climate change, conflict and poverty, nations have recently started to barricade themselves behind new walls.
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I
Whither Cosmopolis: Yearning for Closure in Times of Uncertainty
Reading time: 5 min -
1
A Contagious Craze for Walls
Reading time: 2 min -
2
The “Great Wall” of America: Historical Opportunities
Reading time: 3 min -
3
Between Security and Apartheid: Cinematic Representations of the West Bank Wall
Reading time: 4 min -
4
Battle of Identities at the India-Bangladesh Border
Reading time: 5 min -
5
Turkey and the Middle-East: From Imperial Temptation to National Closure
Reading time: 4 min -
6
Combating Terrorism on the Somalian Border: The Improbable Kenyan Dream?
Reading time: 5 min -
7
Korea: Comfortable Wall, Uncomfortable Peace
Reading time: 4 min