All the World has become neo-liberal. This is no news. But how did it happen? How come that an ideology which, up until 50 years ago, was only known by a bunch of isolated thinkers in sparse universities of Anglo-Saxon countries, became the dominant economic ideology in the whole World?

This summer I took a road trip with some friends to a sometimes forgotten region of Europe: the Balkans, or West Balkans, to be more precise. The facts that I don’t know exactly what to call it, and that people often responded with uncertainty when I told them where I was going, are indicative of the confusion and misconceptions associated with this particular area of Europe.

Globalization has been seen as the principle driver of the pressure to reduce public expenses: as governments try to make their countries more competitive they reduce the burden of excessive taxation and promote more efficiency in the public sector.

“We live in a complex world”. This sentence is constantly used by people around us, and occasionally we might use these words ourselves in conversation. But how complex is it? And, can we really understand its complexity? What about the social world and its complexity? In this post, I introduce the reader to Complexity Theory.

In what follows, the best and the brightest of IANS editors, staff writers and contributors discuss why they intend to vote the way they do. We then finish off our discussion with a short consideration of the alternative: devo plus.

Compared to previous ideas about material poverty, which dominated the poverty discourse up until the 1980s, and which are still prevalent in developing countries, the concept of social inclusion has been viewed as more appealing in describing poverty in contemporary post-industrial societies.