Lecture is, arguably, the oldest known instructional technique used in the university setting.Since it was first employed in Plato's Academy, lecture has become an indispensable part of teaching favored across the college and university curriculum. Recently, this time-honored method of instruction has come under attack for its presumed inability to foster higher order cognitive and attitudinal goals (Cashin 1985;Day 1980;Frederick 1999;Renner 1993). Critics of traditional lecture-based formats call for their replacement with active learning approaches that provide students with an opportunity to meaningfully talk, interact, write, read, and reflect on the content, ideas, and issues of an academic subject (Meyers and Jones 1993, 6).

Abstract:Do different types of natural disasters -droughts, earthquakes, floods, storms, and others -trigger political instability? This study engages with this question. It revisits an ongoing debate over the nature of association between disasters and conflict and re-assesses this relationship using the model of conflict developed by the Political Instability Task Force as well as its data, measures of political instability, and methods of assessment. The study finds only marginal support for the impact of certain types of disasters on the onsets of political instability. The pre-existing country-specific conditions, including the resilience of a state's institutions to crisis, account for most of the variance in the dependent variable. Once the characteristics of a state's political regime are taken into account, the effect of disasters weakens or disappears completely suggesting that natural disasters become catalysts of political instability in only those states, which are already prone to conflict.

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For over a decade, scholars have been studying and debating the role and influence of non‐state actors in democratizing global politics. The sheer volume of studies calls for assessing the current state of this area of research. It also invites systematic analysis of differences in the collected evidence on outcomes of the democratizing efforts of global civil society associations. In this review, I (1) expound the concept of global civil society and point to definitional dilemmas surrounding this term; (2) propose a new analytical framework for examining an association between global civil society and democratization; (3) apply the proposed framework for assessing the findings of empirical studies; (4) discuss the nature of differences and the sources of discord in the analysts’ conclusions; and (5) make recommendations for advancing our knowledge in this important area of research. A principal theme that runs throughout this essay is that the field of global civil society and democratization has ample avenues for further conceptual, theoretical, and empirical work. Our ability to speak credibly of global civil society as a viable democratizing force would be improved with the development of empirical theory, conceptual elaboration, and more rigorous methodologies of research.

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