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Democracy

Is that all there is?
Business-as-usual democracy is for most people about as remote and uninspiring as you can get. Richard Swift teases out how it got that way and what we can do about it.

The burning issue
The statue of liberty needs to change her tune.

Desperately seeking democracy
Pramila Aggarwal's lifelong search for an inclusive democracy has carried her through Indian patriarchy to Canadian racism and hypocrisy. She is still looking.

Dollar doctrine
One of the classics of democratic literature is Alex
de Tocqueville's sceptical Democracy in America. Here Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven do an updated state-of-the-union investigation and come to some disturbing conclusions.


LENA BENGTSSON
/ STILL PICTURES

Democracy - The Facts

Something to build on
A team of researchers scours the South and finds democratic hope in a street-level democracy far from the centres of global power. Jonathan Barker reports the optimistic results of a far-flung research project.

The betrayal
The recent death of democracy in Pakistan has been greeted in the country with a large public yawn. Michael D'Souza explains how Pakistan's elected politicians have squandered popular good will.

Festival for democracy
Celebrating democratic possibilities in the streets.

Development as forced labour
Global economics arbitrarily shakes up people's lives and makes a mockery of our supposed rights.
C Douglas Lummis exposes the antidemocratic core of capitalist economics.

Action & worth reading on democracy

FROM THIS MONTH'S EDITOR



THIS
MONTH'S
THEME

Richard SwiftOne of the pleasures of doing an issue of NI is it carries you into all manner of worlds that you never knew existed. So it is with this issue on democracy. I had no idea of the rich vein of alternative ideas and plans about how to organize democratic life differently. No idea about the number of activist groups who were either critically scrutinising the dominant form of democracy or advocating change. I trust that some of the excitement of these discoveries and the possibilities they open up are communicated in these pages.

While NI has a rotating editorship with the editor-of-the-month responsible for the issue - we hardly do it alone. The new redesigned magazine is the first of the new breed tackled by Alan Hughes, a veteran of the NI design studio whose ideas on design and how it interacts with editorial content have for many years been one of our strengths. I also was fortunate in having the research assistance of two able if informal interns, Ruth Casals and Toby Lloyd who pitched up in Toronto from Barcelona and Brighton respectively with kind offers to lend a hand. This seems to me to speak to the cosmopolitan nature of our enterprise.

The editor's signature.

Richard Swift
for the New Internationalist
Co-operative
rswift@web.net

GISELE WULFSOHN
/ PANOS PICTURES
REGULAR
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Letters
Mobile phones in Seattle; Nagorno Karabakh; the importance of art; world capitalism
Plus Letter from Lebanon by Reem Haddad

Factfile - Forests
Seeing the forest as well as the trees.

View from the South
Ama Ata Aidoo gets the millennium blues in Africa.

Currents
Farmers aren't always Monsanto's best friends; censoring the world's oldest library; oily congress in Calgary; underwater in Madagascar.

Worldbeaters
Robert Mugabe: from liberation hero to national bully

Ether Street
Hindu holies & born-again Clinton.
PLUS NI Crossword

Mixed media
Books: On the Edge: Living with Global Capitalism by Will Hutton and Anthony Giddens; Dreamer: A Novel by Charles Johnson; River Horse by William Least Heat-Moon; Too Much Time by Jane Evelyn Atwood.
Film/Video: Not One Less; Garage Olimpo.
Music: Silence is Sexy by Einstürzende Neubauten; The Rough Guide to World Music, Vol. 1,
PLUS Sharp Focus: Peter Whittaker on the new connections of art and science.
PLUS Webwatch.

Essay - An American tragedy
Peter Constantini was in Nicaragua as the architects of the evil empire destroyed the hope and power of the Sandinista alternative. He evokes the pain of frustrated possibility.

Country Profile - Bangladesh

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FRONT COVER AND MAGAZINE DESIGNED BY ALAN HUGHES.
ONLINE MAG MAINTAINED BY SIMON LOFFLER