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COLONIALISM was officially repudiated as an international practice at the 947th plenary meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in its 1960 "Declaration on the Granting of Independence to Colonial Countries and Peoples." The declaration equated the "subjection of peoples to alien subjugation, domination and exploitation" to "a denial of fundamental human rights"; affirmed the principle of self-determination for all peoples in their political status and economic, social and cultural development; and condemned the 'standard of civilization' rationale for colonial rule by asserting that "inadequacy of political, economic, social or educational preparedness should never serve as a pretext for delaying independence."2 This declaration constituted an official rejection by the society of states of the colonial history of international and transnational relations as it had been practiced for more than four hundred years.

One instrumental defense of democracy is epistemic in character: Insofar as there is a correct answer to be found to some question being politically addressed, democratic decision-making procedures are more likely to find it than any other. But that assumes that the correct answer appears on the agenda in the first place, and that the agenda is not so cluttered that it gets lost there. Two-stage deliberative procedures can help with both problems, first by populating the agenda and then by winnowing it. A good example of both occurring is found in the detailed records now available of top secret ExComm deliberations surrounding the US government's response to the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962

This is the first book to explain how to use key methods in analytical political theory. The methods discussed include contractualism, reflective equilibrium, positive political theory, thought experiments and ideological analysis. Many discussions of political theory methods describe and justify these methods with little or no discussion of their application, emphasizing 'what is' and 'why do' over 'how to'. This book covers all three. Each chapter explains what kinds of problems in political theory might require researchers to use a particular method, the basic principles behind the method being proposed, and an analysis of how to apply it, including concrete principles of good practice. The book thus summarizes methodological ideas, grouped in one place and made accessible to students, and it makes innovative contributions to research methods in analytical political theory. Read more at http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/politics-international-relations/political-theory/methods-analytical-political-theory#EP2v8RWdozzbQZay.99

Deliberative democrats enjoin participants in ideal speech situations never to lie. But game theorists show that people can have purely truth-based motives for strategically misrepresenting information they hold privately when they are deliberating with others. If deliberative democrats want to ensure that every participant in the deliberation fully and truthfully reveals to one another all private information that they hold, that sets some stringent requirements for the nature of the group that deliberates together.

In its recent 'deliberative' turn, democratic theory has forgotten a conventional wisdom, once widely appreciated, that there is much in politics that is better not discussed. In this article, the author catalogues what topics might be deemed 'politically undiscussable', and why, as a first step toward showing how and to what extent talking about such matters might help or hinder their resolution. One important way discussion helps is by information-pooling to establish the truth of the matter. Even where that is not a viable aspiration, discussion might nonetheless serve a 'premise-revealing' function, showing one another that we are reasonable agents and thus helping to desensitize contentious issues.

If free markets consist in nothing more than "capitalist acts between consenting adults" and if in the old legal maxim "volenti non fit injuria" then it seems to follow that free markets do no wrongs. But that defense of free markets wrenches the "volenti" maxim out of context. In common law adjudication of disputes between two parties it is perfectly appropriate to cast standards of "volenti" narrowly and largely ignore "duress via third parties" (wrongs done to or by others who are not themselves party to the action). In economic markets of course those third-party effects are rife. But we want them to be rectified systematically not piecemeal through particular cases between particular parties that happen to come to court. That is the proper province of political philosophers and system-designers in critiquing and constraining the operation of the market.

By analogy to Macpherson's "protective" and "self-developmental" models of liberal democracy, there might be two distinct models of liberal multiculturalism. On the protective-style model, the aim is to protect minority cultures against assimilationist and homogenizing intrusions of the majority. On the other model, here dubbed "polyglot multiculturalism," the majority might expand its own "context for choice" by having more minority cultures from whom to borrow. The latter is a more welcoming and inclusive strategy, still recognizably liberal in form, than the self-defensive liberalism of the more purely protectionist sort.

Lawyers talk of the common law offence of 'perverting the course of justice' by bribing or intimidating judges or jurors, lying to the police or court, concealing or destroying or fabricating evidence. This article argues that the same things are wrong, and wrong for the same reasons, politically as judicially: they prevent people from knowing and applying for themselves the rules by which they are ruled. The sort of excuses typically offered for those perverse practices in politics - that 'it made no difference', that 'they could and should have resisted' or that it is merely a matter of 'fair adversarial competition' - would be laughed out of a court of law, and they should be shunned politically for the same reasons as judicially.

It is clearly undemocratic for wealth to be concentrated in the same few hands, year in and year out, as was traditional in the sorts of aristocracies which Tocqueville contrasted with early American democracy and as arguably remains standard in virtually all modern industrial societies. The crucial question is whether democrats ought to be content with wealth being concentrated in different hands from one year to the next, or whether democratic egalitarians ought to insist instead that wealth ought not to be concentrated in anyone's hands at all. Certainly we do see a fair bit of income volatility in advanced industrial economies. I shall offer evidence of that shortly. But I shall go on to argue -pace Tocqueville and his many followers3-that that is not enough. A more general model of 'democratic welfare' ought to take account of the circulation of public benefits, and of the need for them, alongside earnings flows. Evidence from across the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) suggests that altogether too many of those who fall into poverty would get stuck there, were it not for government benefits; and those public benefits are more democratic in their incidence and their impact in some places than in others. That is one respect in which income volatility alone is insufficient to underwrite the democratic character of the economic order.

One of the most exciting innovations within 'practical democratic theory' in recent years has been the emergence of deliberative democracy, as a theoretically refined ideal with by now some well-honed mechanisms for its implementation on a small scale. Its greatest remaining challenge is to figure out some way to connect those highly controlled, small-scale deliberative exercises to the 'main game', politically. I sketch some limited and indirect ways in which that might happen in national politics, before going on to propose a more novel way in which such deliberative events might be used literally to make international law of a certain sort.

'Mutual obligation' is a deft political slogan. Morally, it evokes deep-seated intuitions about 'fair reciprocity' and the 'duty of fair play'. It seems an easy slide from those intuitions to 'mutual obligation' policies demanding work-for-the-dole. That

Many who discuss global democracy think in terms of a Reform-Act model of democracy, with the ideal being �one person one vote for all affected by the decisions� as in, for example, a second popularly apportioned chamber of United Nations. Politically, that is dismissed as wildly unrealistic. Remember, however, the Reform Acts came very late in process of democratization domestically. Among early steps that eventually led to full democratization of that sort domestically were: (a) limiting the arbitrary rule on the part of the sovereign; and (b) making the sovereign accountable to others (initially a limited set of others, which then expanded). Globally, there are moves afoot in both those directions. Crucially, once those pieces are in place, the circle of accountability basically only ever expands and virtually never contracts.

Each of the main sectors of society-the state, the market and the voluntary non-profit sector-is characterized by a distinctive accountability regime, focusing on a different subject of accountability (actions, reults and intentions, respectively) and a different mechanism of accountability (hierarchy, competition and cooperative networking, respectively). Those different regimes can complement one another, enhancing the democratic accountability of the system overall. They can also undercut one another, if their differences are not respected. Bringing the Third Sector under a market-style accountability regime, through "public-private partnerships" based on competitive tendering, undermines the distinctive contribution that the Third Sector might make.

Republican political theory has undergone a recent revival, first and most strongly among historians, subsequently in a more limited way among lawyers, philosophers, and political scientists. Surveying the many contexts in which republican principles are