On the 23rd of October 2009 the Montesquieu Institute Maastricht hosted a conference on parliamentary involvement with military missions. Even where it does not concern the actual waging of war, sending troops on military missions abroad is never undertaken lightly. No matter how many safeguards are put in place, it remains a decision that potentially risks the lives of men and women in the armed forces.

When lives are so directly influenced by political decision making, the question arises ...

Although we often think of law and the legal system as abstract things, they are not: law is people’s work, made concrete and filled with life by those who draft, interpret, apply, and enforce it, and also by those who reflect on it and teach it. Therefore, how well Indonesia’s legal system works, whether it succeeds in fully implementing the rule of law, and whether it brings justice to Indonesia’s diverse people depends on its jurists, and thereby ultimately on the quality of its lega...

Are liberal democracies in decline? If they are, what role does populism play in this? What can and should democracies do to defend their core features against ‘democratic decay’? And which features can be considered essential? These are difficult questions further complicated by the realisation that their answers depend on perspective. Populism and democratic decay are global phenomena but they play out differently in different countries and regions. They also cannot be properly understo...