OxBlog

# Posted 8:55 AM by Patrick Belton

NEW LISTSERV: I seem, rather accidentally, to have started up a listserv. Given that I have, you're very welcome to join it. The listserv is called H-Democracy, and will deal principally with democratisation and democracy assistance, and will try to share new research, spread word about conferences and edited volumes, and unify the several research and practitioner communities, and also provide some space for polite, rigorous, scholastically-inflected conversation about the subject. The only real ground rule for contributions to the list is that they be academic or technocratic and, as a result, nonpolitical - it wouldn't really be the best place to debate the Iraq war on political grounds, for instance, but might be a decent place to argue normative cases about broader rationales or problems with the notion of democracy assistance, and not a bad place at all to engage in technocratic conversation about the effectiveness of particular forms of policies directed toward democracy assistance, so long as the tone is pretty firmly based around policy and not politics. Bread-and-butter academic posts about democratisation as a topic in comparative politics or regional studies are positively bloody encouraged. I'll try to get some introductory welcome notes out on the list soon, as well as do some desperate pleading for book reviewers (note: boondoggle opportunity for free books!) and additional editors, particularly ones who carry some regional expertise with them. But in the meantime, please feel free to sign up and look at the pretty and inspiring pictures we have on our website.

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