Democracy & Society

The EU-Africa migration summit in Valletta in November 2015 gave birth to a new European funding instrument: the EU Emergency Trust Fund for Africa (EUTF). This study comes to the conclusion that the implementation of migration policy projects supported by EUTF funding primarily benefits the (wealthier) member states of the EU.

In the run-up to the 2013 German federal elections, this publication considers three decades of a changing political landscape with the emergence of the Green Party. The authors discuss how the Green Party built its “brand” and, in so doing, ushered in a fundamental change in German politics and society.

Relationships between democracy and more particularly democratization on the one side and climate change and responses to that on the other are underexplored in the two literatures on democratization and climate change. A special issue of the journal DEMOCRATIZATION, with contributions by several Heinrich Böll Foundation authors, explores a variety of facets of this complex and interdependent relationship.

The Heinrich Böll Foundation will close its office in Ethiopia at the end of 2012. The current political and legal situation in the country is such that the Foundation is unable to carry out its work in a politically sustainable and practicable manner. We can no longer fulfil our mission of working with local partners to support democracy, gender justice and sustainable development.

The presidential election this year in the United States, like in many years before, is going to hinge on the outcome in just a couple of "swing states." Why is it that just a few jurisdictions in the country hold the keys to the White House, while other whole regions are largely irrelevant to presidential campaigns? What is the Electoral College and where did it come from? How could a modern democracy still maintain a system that is clearly anti-democratic? Is there any real possibility of reform?

Having fulfilled their historic mission to build the welfare state, social democrats struggle to articulate a vision beyond the status quo. Where should they turn after the third way?

Looking at the upcoming parliamentary election in Iran, Dr. Hosein Ghazian analyses the challenges of this election in the light of recent political developments in Ira.

Representatives of the Afghan civil society call for further cooperation and the creation of a unified vision shared by the Government of Afghanistan, the international community, and Afghan civil society institutions in order to bring peace and a prosperous future to the country and the Afghan people