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This paper discusses the meaning of 'the West' in Chinese and Japanese political discourse. It argues that for Japanese and Chinese political thinkers, the West does not exist in the West. Rather, the West is sometimes at the periphery and, at other times, at the centre. For them, 'the Chinese' is about the epistemology of all-under-heaven. There is no such concept as 'Other' in this epistemology. As a result, modern Western thinkers depend on opposing the concrete, historical, yet backward Other to pretend to be universal, while Chinese and Japanese thinkers concentrate on self-rectification to compete for the best representative of 'the Chinese' in world politics. 'The Chinese' is no more than an epistemological frame that divides the world into the centre and the periphery. In modern times, the Japanese have accepted Japan as being at the periphery of world politics, while the West is at the centre. To practise self-rectification is to simulate the West. The West is therefore not the geographical West, but at the centre of Japanese selfhood. Self-knowledge produced through Othering and that through self-rectification are so different that the universal West could not make sense of the all-under-heaven way of conceptualizing the West.

Beginning in 1961 there have been repeated calls in Guyana, one of the most ethnically divided societies, for either modification or abolishment of the Westminster model, in particular its winner-take-all and government-opposition component, and its replacement with a consociational power sharing model; but after almost five decades, a power sharing government has not materialized. This paper examines the various proposals and initiatives to tease out their content, the motivation behind them, the discourse they spawned and the possible reasons for their failure to evolve into actual power sharing governments. The paper makes four major arguments. First, there has been a general desire for national reconciliation, mainly on the part of civil society actors and parties that embrace multiethnicity as a guiding philosophy. Second, while the major political parties have supported power sharing in principle, they have been reluctant to embrace it fully when in office. Third, political parties have been reluctant to subordinate their agendas and programs to a common national agenda. Fourth, although some political actors support the need for ethnic unity and peace, they have been reluctant to relinquish their fidelity to some core tenets of liberal democracy.

In this paper, I argue that critical international theory could benefit from a broader and deeper conception of the limits of knowledge-that what is needed is more attention to the role of ambiguity in contemporary politics. While not challenging the usef

The articles that follow are usefully located in the context of four dimensions of 'climate justice', defined here as the study of the special problems of obligation and participation posed by climate impacts and policies for their management. The themes

Twenty years ago Gearid Tuathail called for an approach within Political Geography that made geopolitical culture and the formulation of foreign policy the object of analysis. He specified the task of what subsequently became critical geopolitics as the

Cynthia Cockburn, From Where We Stand: War, Women's Activism and Feminist Analysis, Zed Books, 2007. The current book delves even deeper. It involved her travelling 80,000 miles over a two-year period and visiting 91 feminist groups or organizations in f

How far did the unanimous agreement on the responsibility to protect at the 2005 UN World Summit really mark the international community's acceptance of a new norm supporting collective action - including ultimately military action - when governments thro

Boris Kagarlitsky is one of Russia's best known Marxist dissidents and who has written widely on a range of issues. His latest offering is one of his best. It is a history of Russia (and the Soviet Union) that situates it firmly in a wider European and wo

Is 'consociational democracy' a sustainable working model for deeply divided societies? Despite its relative success in Lebanon, rapid urbanization has presented serious challenges to the rigid confessional power-sharing arrangement. In the city of Beirut

The right to vote ultimately expresses political membership in democratic states. The logic behind franchise rules in a particular state tells us much about how that state conceives its polity. This becomes clear if we study voting rights of marginal grou

Migration exposes a central inconsistency in neoliberal globalisation because, if capital, money, information and knowledge should all flow freely across the globe, then why not people? This broad introductory survey begins with a critical review of persp

Drawing upon Karl Polanyi's journalistic writings and unpublished lectures from the 1920s and 1930s, this article reconstructs the lineaments of his research programme that was to assume its finished form in The Great Transformation. It identifies and cor

As the two-year anniversary of Fiji's military takeover approaches, another international governing body has called the Pacific island nation to hold elections in 2009 as once promised. This time a European Union delegation, led by German legislator Gabr

This paper addresses the question "does international democracy promotion work?" It argues that the simple answer is both yes and no, and that it all depends - on how we define democracy promotion and its objectives, and on which particular approaches, me

The United Nations should become a proactive agent in the dissemination of democratic principles. U.N. Democracy Fund, an American-led initiative that has enjoyed the active support of Chile's member of its board, should continue to grant resources to gr

A day after the interim PM speech on guaranteeing Fiji media freedom, Mr. Evan Hannah, the managing director of the Fiji Times was detained and confirmed to have deported out of country. AuCorp, solivakasama, Babasiga and McKenzie have their says.

In recent years, Charles Taylor has become the foremost practitioner of a new kind of philosophical genre: the brief but wide-ranging historical survey of our contemporary intellectual categories. Modern Social Imaginaries is no exception to this trend. T

Asef Bayat, International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (Apr 7, 2008 at Columbia University, School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA))

In our editors introduction to this journal when it was launched in 2003, we argued that the juxtaposition of processes of globalisation, societies and education provided a unique and important lens through which to examine the recalibration and transform

Zygmunt Bauman interviewed by Elisabetta Ambrosi European citizens today are frightened, fearful, and in search of protection for themselves and for their countries. They increasingly vote for political coalitions promising protection from the effects of