Transregional Center for Democratic Studies

Our point of departure is a conviction that democratization — or, rather, the effort to build and sustain democracy — offers a way to analyze the political, social, and cultural experiences of distinctive regions (or groups of countries).

We focus on four areas which are important for democratization in a range of national contexts: civic life; the public sphere; national and cultural diversity; globalization, development, and equity. In each case we are concerned with ways of expanding the prospects for sustaining democratization. Our interest has both a cognitive and a policy implication, as it seeks to understand how efforts to develop and sustain democracy are enhanced or impeded by choices concerning institutional design.

For TCDS the status of women is an important concern and is therefore an element in all its training and research projects. Our associated faculty include four members whose research and teaching activities are closely related to the social, political, and cultural ramifications of gender, the cultural development of local women's movements, and the politics of inclusion/exclusion.

Building on The New School for Social Research's interdisciplinary tradition, the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies (TCDS) creates and conducts cross-departmental research and training programs aimed at addressing special needs and opportunities for graduate study and advanced scholarship in the new global world.

Following the social and political transformations of recent years, when two contradictory processes — globalization and the increasing fragmentation into ethnic enclaves — have come to dominate the imagination of both scholars and policy-makers, TCDS's integrated set of activities draws on the concept of a 'region' as a promising perspective from which to examine the complex relations between the local and the global.

TCDS's programs, designed to foster a better understanding of how the concerns of “new” and “old” democracies are today beginning to converge, focus on the problems of democratic institutional design at the local, national and, above all, regional levels, primarily in the four regions targeted by its activities — Central and Eastern Europe; Central Asia and the Caucasus; Sub-Saharan Africa; Latin America; and North America. The various projects conducted by the Center are united by their shared concentration on the issues of democratization, diversity, civil society and civic life, globalization, development, and equity. Utilizing these analytic tools, TCDS's activities aim at bridging gaps between theory and practice, between different social science disciplines, and between academia and the "real" world of politics and policy making. (read less)

Our point of departure is a conviction that democratization — or, rather, the effort to build and sustain democracy — offers a way to analyze the political, social, and cultural experiences of distinctive regions (or groups of countries).

We focus on four areas which are important for democratization in a range of national contexts: civic life; the public sphere; national and cultural diversity; globalization, development, and equity. In each case we are concerned with ways of expanding the... (read more)