Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies - Sydney Meeting
Leading international experts on political party development in conflict-prone societies met in Sydney in June 2007 for the second and final author's meeting of a major new project on the subject sponsored by CDI, International IDEA and the United Nations University (UNU).
The project looks at the wave of attempts to influence the way political parties develop in conflict-prone transitional democracies by the regulation of their organisation, financing, and behaviour. While one of the most distinctive aspects of democratic development in recent years, party regulation has received relatively little scholarly attention, despite a great deal of interest from policymakers.
Through examining the impact of recent experiments by new democracies in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America and the South Pacific, the CDI-IDEA-UNU project aims to correct this situation. The project has already generated important new policy-relevant knowledge on party development which will be synthesised in a major new book edited by CDI Director Ben Reilly and Dr Per Nordlund of International IDEA, as well as a series of policy briefs which examine this new phenomenon in detail.
The book, Political Parties in Conflict-Prone Societies: Regulation, Engineering and Democratic Development , will be published by the United Nations University Press in early 2008 and will be launched at a special event at the United Nations in New York.
As the first comprehensive examination of political party regulation in new democracies, it has already attracted a great deal of interest from international organisations seeking to strengthen party systems in developing democracies, and is likely to be the first of a number of new projects on this subject.
