"Globalization has unsettled conventional, nationally based political belief
systems, opening the door to emerging new global political ideologies. While
much analytic focus has been on ideational transformations related to market
globalism (neoliberalism), little attention has been given to its growing number
of ideological challengers. Drawing on data collected from 45 organizations
connected to the World Social Forum, this article examines the political ideas
of the global justice movement, the key antagonist to market globalism from the
political Left. Employing morphological discourse analysis and quantitative
content analysis, the article assesses the ideological coherence of "justice
globalism" against Michael
Freeden's (1996)
three criteria of distinctiveness,
context-bound responsiveness, and effective decontestation. We find that justice
globalism displays ideological coherence and should be considered a maturing
political "alter"-ideology of global significance. The evidence presented in
this article suggests the ongoing globalization of the twenty-first-century
ideological landscape."
"Does democratization increase commitment to multilateral security? In this
article, the author argues that democratic transitions increase the incentives
of states to cooperate in multilateral security and that this is observable in
the rate at which new democracies ratify international treaties of arms control,
nuclear nonproliferation, and disarmament. New democrats, she asserts, seek a
positive international reputation as an insurance mechanism against future
regime reversals. By becoming "good citizens" of the global system, newly
elected democratic leaders seek to expose potential conspirators to the
possibility of diplomatic and economic sanctions if they were to attempt to
reverse the transition. First, using original data on the ratification rates of
201 states for twenty major arms control, nonproliferation, and disarmament
treaties, the present study shows conclusively that new democracies outpace
older democracies and all autocracies in committing to multilateral security.
Second, the study empirically tests whether the swift ratification of security
treaties works as a consolidation strategy and finds that, indeed, it does. That
is, new democracies that commit to nonproliferation and arms control treaties
are less likely to experience a regime reversal."
"The eleven countries of Southeast Asia vary widely by type of regime and
quality of governance. Those that are the most democratic are not always the
best governed, and the reverse is also true. Based on evidence from these
countries, this essay explores two propositions-one normative, the other
empirical. The normative argument is this: Good things ought to go
together. Because democracy is more humane than dictatorship, democracy in
Southeast Asia should also do a better job delivering security, welfare, and
other public goods. The empirical argument, whose validity would bolster the
normative one, is this: Good things do go together. Democracy and
governance, however, do not co-vary in Southeast Asia. These two good
things do not go together. Gaps exist, and they are worth minding, in theory and
in practice."
"Although much prized in daily conversation, good listening has been almost
completely ignored in that form of political conversation we know as democracy.
Practically all the attention has been paid to speaking, both in terms of the
skills to be developed and the ways in which we should understand what enhancing
'inclusion' might mean (i.e. getting more people to speak). The argument here is
that both democratic theory and democratic practice would be reinvigorated by
attention to listening. To ask why listening has been ignored is to inquire into
the very nature of politics, and to suggest a range of ways in which listening
could both improve political processes (particularly democratic ones) and
enhance our understanding of them - including where they do not always work as
well as we might want them to. Four ways in which good listening can help
achieve democratic objectives are outlined: enhancing legitimacy, helping to
deal with deep disagreements, improving understanding and increasing
empowerment. This leads to a discussion of the difference between good and bad
political listening, before the question of 'political noise' is broached (i.e.
what we should be listening for). Finally, the listening lacuna in
Habermas' theory of communicative rationality is pointed out, leading to a
discussion of the potential analytic power of listening in relation to
deliberative democracy in general and one citizens' jury case in particular."
"Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth's three studies-Dealing in Virtue
(1996), The Internationalization of Palace Wars (2002), Asian Legal
Revivals (2010)-trace the globalization of law through "palace wars" among
elites for positions in the "fields of state power." They conclude that
globalization occurs through links among elites engaged in their domestic palace
wars, which independently establish the symbolic power of law in each state. The
article argues that while Dezalay and Garth provide an invaluable new starting
point for further research, they do not adequately consider an emerging field of
research documenting alternative pathways of legal development pursued by local
activists inside and outside the new states of the Global South."
"Recently, theorists have sought to justify transnational democracy by means of
the all-affected principle, which claims that people have a right to participate
in political decision-making that affects them. I argue that this principle is
neither logically valid nor feasible as a way of determining the boundaries of
democratic communities. First, specifying what it means to be affected is itself
a highly political issue, since it must rest on some disputable theory of
interests; and the principle does not solve the problem of how to legitimately
constitute the demos, since such acts, too, are decisions which affect people.
Furthermore, applying the principle comes at too high a cost: either political
boundaries must be redrawn for each issue at stake or we must ensure that
democratic politics only has consequences within an enclosed community and that
it affects its members equally. Secondly, I discuss three possible replacements
for the all-affected principle: (a) applying the all-affected principle to
second-order rules, not to decisions; (b) drawing boundaries so as to maximise
everyone's autonomy; (c) including everyone who is subject to the law. I
conclude by exploring whether (c) would support transnational democracy to the
extent that a global legal order is emerging."
"There is a widespread perception that power is shifting in global politics and
that emerging powers are assuming a more prominent, active and important role.
This article examines the role of emerging powers such as China, India, Brazil
and South Africa (BASIC) in climate change politics and the extent to which
their rise makes the already difficult problem of climate change still more
intractable-due to their rapid economic development, growing power-political
ambitions, rising greenhouse gas emissions and apparent unwillingness to accept
global environmental 'responsibility'. By reviewing the developments in global
climate politics between the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and Rio+20, this article
unsettles the image of a clear shift in power, stressing instead the complexity
of the changes that have taken place at the level of international bargaining as
well as at the domestic and transnational levels. Within this picture, it is
important not to overestimate the shifts in power that have taken place, or to
underplay the continued relevance of understanding climate change within the
North-South frame. Emerging powers will certainly remain at the top table of
climate change negotiations, but their capacity actively to shape the agenda has
been limited and has, in some respects, declined. Even though emerging powers
have initiated and offered greater action on climate change, both
internationally and domestically, they have been unable to compel the
industrialized world to take more serious action on this issue, or to stop them
from unpicking several of the key elements and understandings of the original
Rio deal. At the same time, developing world coalitions on climate change have
also fragmented, raising questions about the continued potency of the 'global
South' in future climate politics"
"This paper is a critical interrogation of the dominant Africanist discourse on
African state forms and its relationship with what is seen as pervasive state
failure on the continent. Through an examination of the neo-patrimonialist
literature on African states, this paper argues that what informs such
problematic scholarship, inscribed on the conceptual and analytical landscape of
the Weberian ideal-typical conception of state rationality is a vulgar
universalism that tends to disregard specific historical experiences while
subsuming them under the totalitarian grip of a Eurocentric unilinear
evolutionist logic. The narrative that such scholarship produces not only
constructs a mechanistic conception of state rationality based on the experience
of the Western liberal state as the expression of the universal, but also denies
the specificity of the continent's historical experience, by either denying its
independent conceptual existence or vulgarising its social and political
formations and realities, dismissing them as aberrant, deviant, deformed and of
lesser quality. Immanent in this move is the ideological effacement and the
rendering invisible, hence the normalisation of the relational and structural
logic, of past histories of colonial domination and contemporary imperial power
relations within which the states in Africa have been historically constituted
and continue to be reconstituted and reimagined. When exactly does a state fail,
the paper asks. Could what is defined as state failure actually be part of the
processes of state formation or reconfiguration, which are misrecognised or
misinterpreted because of the poverty of Africanist social science and
ethnocentric biases of the particular lenses used to understand them?"
"This article problematizes the deployment of the concept of agency in
contemporary international relations scholarship. It examines the problems of
relying on a foundationalist conception of agency as a tool to achieve
meaningful political action by exploring the case of scholarship on the topic of
women and terrorism. I argue that scholars on the topic of women and terrorism
inscribe agency into women's subjectivities, that is, they place agency as the
goal of feminist political action. By tracing the way that scholars write agency
into women's subjectivities through an examination of the literature on the
topic, I am able to demonstrate how reliance on agency as a foundational concept
hinders the goals of feminists."
"Inspired by the conclusions of the United Nations Intellectual History Project,
this article seeks to enrich the ongoing discussion on the role of ideas in UN
activities. The focus here is on security, an issue often regarded as the
organisation's raison d'ĂȘtre. The article argues that over the past two
decades the ideology of human security has been the driving normative force
behind the global policies advocated by the UN in the area of security. The
first part analyses the UN's official discourse, and demonstrates the political
importance that it ascribes to the concept of human security. The second section
examines a set of global policies that illustrate how the world body has sought
to put the principles of human security into practice. While recognising that
these policies fall short of the ambitions articulated in UN rhetoric, the
article suggests that they have opened a small but very real breach in the
epistemic framework underlying the traditional conception of security."
"In the current attempt to develop a Global Political Sociology, the concept
of functional differentiation increasingly attracts attention. Functional
differentiation seems to promise an avenue to describe global processes beyond a
methodological nationalism. In this contribution I argue that while we have
already made some progress in describing the spatial implications of functional
differentiation, less effort has been spent on the temporal side of the story.
This contribution highlights this aspect and points to shifting temporalities in
the context of finance and international law. This perspective suggests that
many "governance problems" might be due to the clash of different temporalities
co-existing in world society."
"The global governance of climate change represents one of the more profound and,
to date, intractable sets of problems confronting humanity. Legitimacy,
accountability, fairness, and representation matter as well as effectiveness. In
the absence of effective centralised authority, these democratic norms need to
be sought in a polycentric context. An approach to democratisation is advanced
that de-emphasises authoritative formal institutions, and instead operates in
the more informal realm of the engagement and contestation of discourses in
global public spheres. Democracy here is conceptualised not in terms of
elections and constitutions, but in aspirations for inclusive, competent, and
dispersed reflexive capacity. Based on empirical analysis of discursive
engagement in several structured settings, key challenges for improving the
democratic quality of global climate governance are assessed."
"Climate change has come to hold a central position within many policy arenas.
However, a particular framing of climate change and climate science, underpinned
by modernist assumptions, dominates policy discourse. This leads to restricted
policy responses reflecting particular interests and socio-political
imaginaries. There is little public debate concerning this framing or the
assumptions underpinning approaches to climate policy. The implications of this
are illustrated by considering the ways in which UK planning policy has adapted
to reflect commitments to mitigate climate change. It is shown that the
importance attributed to climate change mitigation has had negative impacts on
democratic involvement in planning processes. Given the uncertainty and high
stakes of climate science (typical of post-normal science), value may be gained
by incorporating the views and perspectives of 'extended peer communities', to
question not only the processes and findings of climate science but also the
ways in which the science is interpreted and responded to through policy."
"Over the past 30 years, transnational space has emerged as a key locus of social
transformation. Activist networks and movement coalitions span the globe in an
attempt to build an alternative politics. Many transnational activist networks
(TANs), however, are meeting sites of two very different entities-movements and
organizations-and must thus contend with a crucial divide in the political
arena. While social movements usually act extra-institutionally and are often
bound together by strong emotions, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), by
virtue of their legally encoded form, often proceed within prescribed channels
and must remain accountable to outside stakeholders. What happens when social
movements encounter organizations? Can the tensions between social movements and
NGOs be harnessed to create a lasting convergence aimed at building a more
equitable democratic politics? My aim in this article is to contribute to a
further texturing of our ideas of transnational space by raising some questions
and concerns regarding the 'actually existing democracies' being enacted there.
I focus on the tension between the more emotive aspects of mobilization and the
inevitable day-to-day bureaucratic procedures meant to ensure transparent and
equitable democratic practice. These two forces, though complementary parts of
any well-functioning TAN, are also forces of attrition. How close they are, and
how they can both focus activists' energy and grind that energy to a halt, is
shown by the example of the Amazon Alliance, a network of indigenous activists
and conservation, human rights and environmental justice organizations, working
to protect indigenous territories and the Amazonian ecosystem."
"This study examines online collective action concerning grievances of farmers
whose land was expropriated by the Chinese government for economic development.
Such actions have resulted in numerous conflicts between officials and farmers
who fear losing their sole survival source without adequate compensation. The
authors examine two cases of such grievances: the Wang Shuai and Wu Baoquan
Incidents. These cases were initiated by aggrieved 'netizens' and reinforced by
the news media through the Internet. Data include online material from a sample
of seven Chinese websites discussing the cases. Using perspectives on framing
and its connection to online activism, the authors examine how protest on behalf
of initiators and varied support from the media produced different outcomes.
Concise framing and continuous media attention are essential to mobilizing
support for successful collective action. These techniques and new technologies
are part of an expanding trend in grassroots activism in China."
"Recent studies on causes of intergovernmental transformation in old and new
democracies have found that decentralization is often the outcome of
negotiations between national and local political interests. South Korea is
commonly believed to be an exception because local elections and institutions
introduced in the early 1990s were, by and large, the product of negotiations
among political elites at the centre, without significant inclusion of local
actors. However, this article attempts to explicate a hitherto ignored aspect of
decentralization reform in Korea: the role of civil society and local activism
in the politics of decentralization. In the 2000s, several 'triggering events'
such as economic instability, democratic consolidation, emergence of civilian
leaders, and the growth of civil society provided a strong momentum for the
decentralization movement. We demonstrate how civic organizations at both
national and local levels have played significant roles in proposing and pushing
for decentralization, and argue that the bottom-up movement for decentralization
under the Roh Moo-hyun administration was surprisingly well mobilized and
institutionalized, especially at the agenda-setting stage."
"This article provides a broad, cross-disciplinary overview of scholarship
which has explored the dynamics between social movements, protests and their
coverage by mainstream media across sociology, social movement studies,
political science and media and communications. Two general approaches are
identified 'representational' and 'relational' research. 'Representational'
scholarship is that which has concerned itself with how social movements are
portrayed or 'framed' in the media, how the media production process facilitates
this, and the consequences thereof. 'Relational' scholarship concentrates on the
asymmetrical 'relationship' between social movements, the contestation of media
representation and the media strategies of social movements. Within these two
broad approaches different perspectives and areas of emphasis are highlighted
along with their strengths and weaknesses. The conclusion reflects on current
developments in this area of study and offers avenues for future research."
"This article argues that recent de-democratization in Iran can be best
understood by analysing the interplay of domestic Iranian politics and two
external developments. These were the colour revolutions in several
post-communist states and the hostile US policies toward Iran after the invasion
of Iraq in 2003. Together they generated a political climate in Iran conducive
to hardliner attempts to discredit and neutralize the reformist opposition. The
regime tried to delegitimize the opposition by portraying it as being in the
service of foreign elements and claiming it was seeking to foment a popular
uprising. The consequences were twofold. On the one hand, the regime's
identification of civic and political activism as threats to national security
greatly reduced the manoeuvrability of the reformist opposition and contributed
to their marginalization. These developments point to the limits and unintended
consequences of democracy promotion in Iran. On the other hand, the
post-electoral protests of 2009 exposed the limits of conspiracy discourse in
silencing mass discontent. This article argues that the regime's attempt to
portray the unrest as a foreign conspiracy failed to convince a large segment of
the population."
"How does the globalization of law, the emergence of multiple and shifting venues
of legal accountability, enhance or evade the fulfillment of international human
rights? The utility of law for the fulfillment of human rights can be summarized
as a combination of normative principles, universal repertoire of definitions
and boundaries, links to state enforcement, predictable processes for conflict
resolution, and a doctrine of equal standing (Kinley
2009
27.
KINLEY , David . 2009 . Civilising Globalisation:
Human Rights and the Global Economy , Cambridge , NY : Cambridge
University Press .
View all
references
: 215). The
intersection between the globalization of law and the globalization of rights is
a question of global governance: In what ways and to what extent can and should
law across borders regulate and enforce the protection of individuals from abuse
of both global and local authority? What does existing literature tell us about
where we stand in our understanding of the extent and meaning of these
intersecting forms of globalization? There is a rough spectrum from pessimistic
structural theories through more optimistic cosmopolitan reformist theories of
norm change, with a middle position of a sociological and indeterminate
dialectical struggle over the terms and impact of global governance. While we
see clear evidence in the international human rights regime of the globalization
of norms, definitions, and processes, it is unclear how much the globalization
of law has enhanced enforcement or even standing for the fulfillment of core
rights of the person."
This article challenges the optimism common to liberal IR and IL scholarship on the 'rule of law' in global governance. It argues that the concept of the 'rule of law' is often employed with sparse inquiry into the politics of its practical meaning. Specifically, the article focuses on liberal research that advocates the emergence of a 'global' judiciary, and the claim that judicial governance will marginalize state power and authority. Rather than employ a zero-sum conception of power, this article regards a prospective global legal system less as a constraint on state power and more as a rationale for rule 'through' law by vested actors. To make the argument, Michel Foucault's concept of 'governmentality' is combined with Barnett and Duvall's notion of 'productive power' to denote how legal techniques of power are integral to the construction of social 'truth' and consequently the governance of conduct. This is further associated with Koskenniemi's critical scholarship on the power of law's perceived objectivity and universality. In this vein, the article questions how liberal scholars use the American judicial model (the Marbury ideal) to claim that an institutionalization of 'global' judicial authority can deliver the rule of 'no one' in global governance. A governmentality perspective is then applied which suggests that the lack of supreme constitutional rules at the global level makes judicial governance less a check than a means to propagate normative standards conducive to dominant state power.
Centre for Globalization and Cultural Studies
The objectives of the Centre are: to advance research on globalization and culture within a Canadian-based international dialogue involving collaborative, interdisciplinary investigation.