Building Global Democracy

"The post-war multilateral order is in trouble. Clear, effective and accountable decision-making is needed across a range of urgent global challenges; and, yet, the collective capacity for addressing these matters is in doubt." David Held maps the pressin

Introducing certain correctives to Beck's `cosmopolitan manifesto', I explore the complexities of second modern communicative agency and the constitution of the reflexive, socio-technical subject.

When implementing democracy, local discourses of decision-making affect the ways in which the liberal democracy is comprehended, realized and practiced. One problem with the so-called 'transition paradigm' is then the neglect of local cultures and institutions and their impact on implemented democratic systems. Given this, the aim of the article is therefore to give a deep(er) understanding of the processes of change in implemented democracies through a close empirical reading of interviews with Cambodian politicians and non-governmental organizations (NGOs). A critical examination of the conditions in Cambodia reveals how liberal democracy is not only re-interpreted and hybridized but also occasionally resisted in line with the local discourses of power.

The central challenge for theorists and practitioners of radical politics today is to develop forms of action and organisation that account for the specificity of diverse local struggles and promote the free transformation of individual and collective subjectivities through political action, but also provide the means for collective action on a global scale. This article examines the radical democratic theory of Chantal Mouffe, post-sovereignty cosmopolitanism of David Held and contemporary anarchist theory, in light of participant research in contemporary global resistance movements

Commenting on the state of trans-Atlantic relations in 2008, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter argued that European Union governments are "not our vassals" but "occupy an equal position with the U.S." Documents released over the past month appear to offer a different view. In a report finalised earlier in December, the European Union's foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton signalled that the EU's main purpose internationally is to "help" Washington "achieve its global objectives." By coincidence, a series of secret cables from U.S. embassies around the world made public by the website WikiLeaks indicates that the U.S. expects Europe to constantly act as its subordinate.

This paper represents a collective contribution to an ongoing debate on the benefits and disadvantages of export-based, industrial jobs for women as well as on the implications of global labor standards on these types of jobs. On the basis of extensive research on women in Mexico's and Central America's maquiladoras (assembly plants that produce export goods), this paper aims to problematize the viewpoints that present export-based, industrial jobs as dignified alternatives for women in the South and to question the skepticism about global labor standards as a possible alternative for improving work conditions in all sectors producing for export. In so doing, the paper stresses three interrelated issues: a) the relevance of local and regional contexts that inform diverse industrialization paths over time, b) the agency the women workers represent, and c) the legal instruments already existent in our common efforts to improve working conditions.

Barry Buzan & Lene Hansen (2009) note that the first glimmer of concern with women and security within international relations and peace studies was a site of tension: in the 1970s and into the 1980s, women were not on the agenda of international relations at all. Peace theorists embraced the concept of structural violence but also excluded women from their discussions. There are now new inclusion/exclusion tensions within feminist international relations and its security wing. In this article I address two tensions: (1) concern to maintain the stance that security is a peace issue as some venture systematically into feminist war studies, and (2) a tendency to issue harsh judgements of feminists whose views challenge the accommodation of cultural difference. I briefly consider examples of these two tensions and suggest ways to work with and beyond the structure of international relations to 'evolve' (feminist) security studies further.

This article explains the US foreign policy discourse surrounding human rights, democracy and the Internet as the pursuit of "technological closure" for the network. US policymakers draw upon international norms and values to construct a symbolically powerful argument regarding the valid material composition of the Internet. Through these arguments, the US creates a narrative that casts its vision for the Internet as moral, just and progressive. In contrast, opponents of the American vision of the Internet are cast as backward states impeding the flow of history. In the process, the contested nature of the technology and its contingent nature are sidelined, naturalizing and reifying its historically and culturally specific evolution, to the benefit of American foreign policy aims. I will outline the politics of identity construction, and the meaning attached to the technological structure of the Internet, as central to the ongoing contestation over its form. Finally, I will note how the narrative created by US foreign policymakers legitimizes their material practice of supporting anticensorship technologies.

Power-sharing agreements have been widely used in Africa as paths out of civil war. However, the research focus on conflict mitigation provides an inadequate guide to recent cases such as Kenya and Zimbabwe. When used in response to flawed elections, pacts guaranteeing political inclusion adversely affect government performance and democratization. Political inclusion in these cases undermines vertical relationships of accountability, increases budgetary spending, and creates conditions for policy gridlock. Analysis using three salient dimensions highlights these negative effects: Origin distinguishes extra-constitutional pacts from coalitions produced by more stable institutions, function contrasts postwar cases from scenarios where the state itself faces less risk, and time horizon refers to dilemmas that weigh long-term costs versus short-term benefits. The conclusion suggests that the drawbacks of inclusive institutions can be moderated by options such as sunset clauses, evenhanded prosecution of human rights violations, and by strengthening checks on executive authority.

Post-genocide Rwanda has become a 'donor darling', despite being a dictatorship with a dismal human rights record and a source of regional instability. In order to understand international tolerance, this article studies the regime's practices. It analyses the ways in which it dealt with external and internal critical voices, the instruments and strategies it devised to silence them, and its information management. It looks into the way the international community fell prey to the RPF's spin by allowing itself to be manipulated, focusing on Rwanda's decent technocratic governance while ignoring its deeply flawed political governance. This tolerance has allowed the development of a considerable degree of structural violence, thus exposing Rwanda to the risk of renewed violence.

Why have there been so many obituaries for the women's movement, written in so many different countries, despite so many continuing manifestations of life? We argue here that the problem is not simply the short attention span of the media and the constant quest for newness but also the terms in which social movements have been understood. This is partly a methodological question concerning how social movements are distinguished from other political actors, the repertoires that are expected of them, and the associated measurement of social movement activity through protest event databases. It is also a question of how "institutionalization" is understood. It has often been assumed that social movement activism is by definition extrainstitutional or that institutionalization is something that comes after, replaces, or usurps the role of social movements.

In the shadow of the nation-state, transnational dynamics and contacts operating from a non-national logic have been always present and are even increasingly so. Nation-state has never completely controlled all kinds of crossborder transactions, whether it be those directed by large international conglomerates, migrants, and refugee flows, or even the variety of illegal activities of transnational criminal organizations, be it pirating, maritime or other, be it slave trade, organ trafficking or even the lucrative drug trade, and others. Today, one cannot work from a single level of abstraction that revolves around nation-states and the "national." Such focus would miss on a wide range of power relations above and beyond states that involve crossborder dynamics. The range of transnational interactions associated with the process of globalization and alterglobalization constitute genuine and important challenge to our understanding of global politics. In this article, I argue, that political analysts need to engage in multiscalar analysis (meaning the coexistence and co-constitution of various spaces-local, national, regional, and global) and that they must also recognize that it is heuristically fruitful to apprehend global processes in a dialectical fashion. In short, to grasp the enigma of globalization and of its antithesis alterglobalization requires exploring innovative conceptual and methodological approaches.

In certain separatist conflicts there is a greater likelihood of external mediation if the political 'redefinition' of the state insisted upon by the insurgents undergoes a revision, from secession to self-determination, understood as a variant of autonomy. In the same vein, although it may not happen concurrently, insurgent movements become more amenable to external mediation if and when opposing governments revise the preferred conflict outcome from a military defeat of the insurgents to a 'containment' of the movement. These two developments - a revised demand from the insurgents for how the state should be defined and an altered military strategy adopted by the government - can serve as 'objective referents' helping external parties to identify a ripe moment in the conflict and initiate mediation.

This noble new foreign policy direction was short-lived. Instead of building up and strengthening Canada's democracy support architecture, our government has been systematically dismantling it.

This paper discusses the potential contribution of parliamentary institutions and networks to the democratization of global economic governance. It places the analysis in the context of the larger debate on the democratic deficit of international economic institutions, in particular the WTO. On a theoretical level, the paper distinguishes different notions of legitimacy and democracy in order to identify which aspects of democratic legitimacy of global economic governance can be addressed through transnational parliamentarization. It is argued that national parliaments must react to the emergence of global economic governance in a multi-level system through new forms of transnational parliamentarization. In its empirical part, the paper assesses the Parliamentary Conference on the WTO (PCWTO) and the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank (PNoWB) as two examples of such transnational parliamentarization. Drawing on the theory of deliberative democracy the paper argues that the contribution of these settings to democratic global governance should not be measured on the basis of their formal decision-making power but with regard to their role as fora for transnational discourses and on their potential to empower national parliamentarians.

Recent scholarship on governmentality promises to reinvigorate literary critical analysis of how novels, poems, and plays help to organize the world's populations as they interact. In turn, literary criticism helps to illuminate the global implications of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, published in English as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). By privileging varied practice over unifying theory, Foucault's approach leads scholars to examine the circulation of governmental techniques in conjunction with the circulation of governable populations. An emphasis on mobility and exchange should appeal particularly to specialists in immigrant, imperial, and postcolonial literature. While considering a range of literary critical and social scientific scholarship on governmentality, this essay also shows how literature itself authorizes discrepant forms of administration. I contend that literature and literary criticism engage in imaginative reformulations and reinventions of the art of government, and in so doing contribute to debates about governing that are every bit as cross-disciplinary as they are transnational.

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.

The books under review, though offering important advances in understanding their particular issue areas of global governance, together reproduce a number of liberal political-economic silences that obscure key power relations, a process made visible through resistance. These silences privilege the formal public-private sphere of civil society over both alternative expressions of social agency and the continuing importance of state sovereignty, leading to false claims of wider participation, partnership and empowerment in global politics and also unexpected social and environmental consequences. Hajnal, P. I. (2007) The G8 System and the G20: Evolution, Role and Documentation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mattli, W. and Woods, N. (eds) (2009) The Politics of Global Regulation. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press. Hall, R. B. (2008) Central Banking as Global Governance: Constructing Financial Credibility. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Singh, J. P. (2008) Negotiation and the Global Information Economy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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.

Foucault introduced the concept 'governmentality' to refer to the conduct of conduct, and especially the technologies that govern individuals. He adopted the concept after his shift from structuralist archaeology to historicist genealogy. But some commentators suggest governmentality remains entangled with structuralist themes. This article offers a resolutely genealogical theory of govermentality that: echoes Foucault on genealogy, critique, and technologies of power; suggests resolutions to problems in Foucault's work; introduces concepts that are clearly historicist, not structuralist; and opens new areas of empirical research. The resulting genealogical theory of governmentality emphasizes nominalism, contingency, situated agency, and historicist explanations referring to traditions and dilemmas. It decenters governance by highlighting diverse elite narratives, technologies of power, and traditions of popular resistance.