ORIGINS & GOALS

Associated Faculty &
Scholars

Building on the Graduate Faculty'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 the 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. The Center'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 level, primarily in the four regions targeted by its activities—Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus; Sub-SaharanAfrica; 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 Center'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.