Building Global Democracy recent articles
Globalization through the Lens of Palace Wars: What Elite Lawyers’ Careers Can and Cann…
“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.”
The boundaries of transnational democracy: alternatives to the all-affected principle
“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.”
Emerging powers, North–South relations and global climate politics – HURRELL …
globalization,governance,environment
“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”
Neo-patrimonialism and the discourse of state failure in Africa – Review of African Pol…
“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?”
Gendering Terror – International Feminist Journal of Politics – Volume 14, Issue 1
“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.”
Human Security: The Making of a UN Ideology – Global Society – Volume 26, Issue 2
“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’être. 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.”
World Society, Social Differentiation and Time – Kessler – 2012 – International Politic…
“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 discursive democratisation of global climate governance – Environmental Politics – …
“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.”
Changing climate, changing democracy: a cautionary tale – Environmental Politics – Volu…
“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.”
Transnational Activist Networks: Mobilization between Emotion and Bureaucracy – Social …
civil society,transnationalism
“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.”
COMMUNICATING INJUSTICE? – Information, Communication & Society -
“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.”
Civil society and local activism in South Korea’s local democratization – Democratizati…
“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.”
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