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According to the bioethical principle of individual decisional autonomy, the patient has a right of informed consent to any medical or experimental procedure. The principle is politically liberal by advocating significant individual freedom as guaranteed by law and secured by civil liberties. When practiced in illiberal communities, might it have a political liberalizing effect? I respond first by analyzing cross-national norms of individual decisional autonomy to identify tensions with illiberal community; second, by examining examining Singapore in a single case study to show that liberal bioethics does not promote political liberalization; and third, by showing that the possibility of practicing liberal bioethics in research, clinically as well as in education, does not require a democratic order, and that liberal bioethics is unlikely to encourage the liberalization of illiberal political communities. Hence, it may never contribute to the development of globally effective cross-national norms for the legal regulation of bioethical research and clinical practice. Fourth, to bolster this analysis, I anticipate several possible objections to various of its aspects.

This paper reconsiders the proposition that remittances act as a political curse by reducing the poor’s demand for economic redistribution. With a newer democratization model focused on the demand for income protection from the rising groups in society, remittances may instead function as a political blessing. Since remittances increase income not only for the middle-class citizens that receive most of them, but also for the merchant and working classes that do not receive them per the multiplier effect, remittances should increase the demand for political rights to protect the economic assets of these societal groups. Using an error correction model with both country and year fixed effects, it reports a significant positive relationship between the change in democracy and net remittance inflows as a share of GDP using three different operational measures for democracy. It also reports results consistent with the underlying causal argument, showing how remittances increase national income and societal economic freedom.

\"When will Middle Eastern countries democratize?\" is the normative question that guided the literature on regime change in the Arab world during the 1990s. Since significant political changes but no systemic transitions have occurred, this question needs reformulation: what accounts for the persistence of Arab authoritarianism? Escaping thus from the teleological tunnel permits the identification of two major developments. The first is an oscillation between controlled political liberalizations and deliberalizations, and the second consists of five areas of change within regimes: legitimation, elites, institution building, co-optation, and regimes' reactions to external influences. The second trend is particularly crucial for understanding the durability of authoritarianism in the Arab world. Our findings clarify differences, but also provide bases for comparison between the Arab world and those developing regions where political transition did occur. /// \"Quand les pays du Moyen-Orient se démocratiseront-ils?\" est la question normative determinante à la littérature sur les changements de régime dans le monde arabe des années 1990. Puisque des changements politiques significatifs, mais sans transition systématique, se sont produits, cette question a besoin d'être reformulée: qu'est-ce qui explique la persistance de l'autoritarisme arabe? Alors, échappant au raisonnement téléologique, on discerne deux développements principaux: l'oscillation entre libéralisations et restrictions politiques contrôlées, d'une part, et, d'autre part, cinq secteurs de changement au sein des régimes: légitimation, élites, mise en place institutionnelle, cooptation et réactions des régimes aux influences externes. Ce second aspect est particulièrement décisif pour comprendre la longévité de l'autoritarisme dans le monde arabe. Nos analyses clarifient les différences, mais fournissent également des bases pour la comparaison entre le monde arabe et les régions en voie de développement dans lesquelles la transition politique s'est produite.

On January 27, 2017, the week-old Trump administration temporarily banned immigration to the United States from seven countries, including three in Africa (Libya, Somalia, and Sudan), and blocked refugees from all countries. The executive order prompted protests around the world and drew attention to the plight of refugees and migrants. Community groups held town hall meetings, and refugee service organizations saw a jump in contributions and volunteers.1Social media were awash with stories about people whose lives were upended when the ban prevented them from seeking medical care in the United States or reuniting with loved ones. But the executive order also had supporters, including some who called for a boycott of Budweiser over a commercial about its founder's arriving in America as a refugee from Germany in the 1850s.

This essay examines Kazakhstan’s latest economic modernization campaign, highlights its shortcomings, and proposes how the West could assist the country’s ruling elite in carrying out reforms to complement the modernization process.

Since opening to the international community following the Paris Peace Accords in 1991, Cambodia has incrementally adopted a stance of political liberalization. Whether because of the exigencies of reconstruction and development or by intention, large tracts of the institutional domain have been delivered into the hands of development agencies, corporations, non-governmental organizations and other private entities. Higher education was no exception, witnessing runaway growth in private-sector capacity in a lax regulatory environment since the mid-1990s. Despite more recent regulatory assertiveness reflecting the government's enhanced capacity, the imminent processes of regional integration in ASEAN are again diminishing the Cambodian state's autonomy and room to maneuver.

This article analyses the inaugural National Day Rally speeches of three Singapore prime ministers. It locates these speeches in the continuous ideological work that the People's Action Party (PAP) government has to do in order to maintain consensus and forge new alliances among classes and social forces that are being transformed by globalisation. Increasingly, these speeches have had to deal with the contradictions between nation-building and the tensions between the liberal and reactionary tendencies of the global city. It is argued that such a situation has made it futile for the government to attempt a straightforward ideological mobilisation of the people into a relatively homogeneous national community. The PAP government's ideological struggle to forge consensus has been balanced by a strategy of divide-and-rule. Ironically, the rally speeches have been as much about dividing as they have been about uniting.

The contrast between Kuwait and the UAE today illustrates the vastly different possible futures facing the smaller states of the Gulf. Dubai's rulers dream of creating a truly global business center, a megalopolis of many millions attracting immigrants in great waves from near and far. Kuwait, meanwhile, has the most spirited and influential parliament in any of the oil-rich Gulf monarchies. InThe Wages of Oil, Michael Herb provides a robust framework for thinking about the future of the Gulf monarchies. The Gulf has seen enormous changes in recent years, and more are to come. Herb explains the nature of the changes we are likely to see in the future. He starts by asking why Kuwait is far ahead of all other Gulf monarchies in terms of political liberalization, but behind all of them in its efforts to diversify its economy away from oil. He compares Kuwait with the United Arab Emirates, which lacks Kuwait's parliament but has moved ambitiously to diversify. This data-rich book reflects the importance of both politics and economic development issues for decision-makers in the Gulf. Herb develops a political economy of the Gulf that ties together a variety of issues usually treated separately: Kuwait's National Assembly, Dubai's real estate boom, the paucity of citizen labor in the private sector, class divisions among citizens, the caste divide between citizens and noncitizens, and the politics of land.

We consider a simple political-economic model where capitalist investment is constrained by the government's temptation to expropriate. Political liberalization can relax this constraint, increasing the government's revenue, but also increasing the ruler's political risks. We analyze the ruler's optimal liberalization, where our measure of political liberalization is the probability of the ruler being replaced if he tried to expropriate private investments. Poorer endowments can support reputational equilibria with more investment, even without liberalization. So we find a resources curse, where larger resource endowments can decrease investment and reduce the ruler's revenue. The ruler's incentive to liberalize can be greatest with intermediate resource endowments. Strong liberalization becomes optimal in cases where capital investment yields approximately constant returns to scale. Adding independent revenue decreases optimal liberalization and investment. Mobility of productive factors that complement capital can increase incentives to liberalize, but equilibrium prices may adjust so that liberal and authoritarian regimes co-exist.