Search

This paper proposes an epistemological decolonisation of liberal ideas of global justice that shifts emphasis from abstract morals to specific material aspects of individual and group human rights. In order to respond to the empirical needs of the contemporary South a decolonised global justice focuses on the human rights of a specific, rather than a generic, type of individual - the international migrant. More specifically, this proposal of a decolonised global justice bases the responsibility of nations towards documented and undocumented migrants on the universal material principle of ethics and the obligations of States with respect to the life of all people in every aspect in accordance with the general principles of the right to development. In order to establish the nature of this responsibility, the paper also reinterprets the rights to movement, asylum, work and a dignified life for the formulation of rights to mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Rorty's proposals for intercultural conversation as a path to global justice. Three primary claims are advanced: that Rorty's embrace of philosophy as cultural politics is of a piece with his call in the mid-1970s for philosophers to be more involved in the cause of enlarging human freedom; that his most explicit turn away from philosophy and theory toward novels and narrative is an attempt to expand the conversation beyond the West; and that his essay "Feminism and Pragmatism" offers a picture of social change that values the contribution of marginalized voices. After underscoring some important contributions, I argue that rather than merely assimilating non-Western voices to "our" conversation, what cultural politics demands is attention the creative power of difference, which may mean ending this conversation and starting another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the concept of multitude as articulated in the book "Multitude," by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. Outlook of Negri and Hardt for the anti-globalization movement; Attempts by Negri and Hardt to articulate the connection of the multitude to democracy; Analysis by Negri and Hardt on globalist radical movements.

Since the WTO meeting in Seattle in 1999 almost every summit of international organizations has led to street mobilizations. Recently also the European Union has become an important target of this diverse transnational network of different civil organizations and movements. So far, little is known about the participants of these protest demonstrations and the way they are mobilized. By means of a large survey conducted under protesters from all over Europe during the anti-globalist manifestation against the EU summit at Laken (Belgium), we will try to unveil the (transnational) mobilization process of the anti-globalization movement. Special attention will be devoted to the specific impediments to transnational mobilization in the European context. How did the anti globalization movement(s) managed to overcome this obstacles while other movements only succeed to coordinate collective action on a national level? Furthermore we will look at the impact these difficulties have on the motivation and profile of foreign versus local protesters. Are foreign protesters more fervent protesters than the local participants and do they take a stronger stance towards their protest actions and globalization? Finally we speculate on the future possibilities of this movement and transnational collective action in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Collective action and social movement protest has become commonplace in our 'demonstration-democracy' and no longer surprises the media or the public. However, as will be shown, this was not the case with the recent anti-globalisation protests that attracted demonstrators from countries all over the world. The battles of Seattle, Washington, Prague and Genoa, with an unforeseen mixture of nationalities and movements, became world news. Interestingly, the new media seemed to play a crucial role in the organization of these global-protests. This chapter maps this movement-in-progress via an analysis of the websites of anti-globalisation, or more specifically anti-neo-liberal globalisation organizations. It examines the contribution of these sites to three different conditions that establish movement formation; collective identity; actual mobilisation and a network of organizations. This, ongoing, explorative research indicates signs of an integration of different organizations involved and attributes an important role to the Internet. However, whilst both our methodology and subject are evolving rapidly, conclusions, as our initial results show, must be tempered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Food security is of great urgency in the developing world. Many countries have sought to attract foreign capital to promote development and reduce hunger. But how do foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows affect food security? Extant research based on dependency and modernization arguments or the globalization debate offers contradictory theoretical predictions and produces conflicting evidence. We resolve the puzzle by disaggregating FDI. Foreign investments in distinct economic sectors have disparate attributes, producing different welfare consequences for food security. We test our arguments using the food security indicators recommended by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and new data on sector-specific FDI inflows to 56 developing and transition economies between 1981 and 2001. We find highly robust evidence that manufacturing FDI improves food security. We also find that primary-sector FDI reduces food security and that service-sector FDI has an ambiguous but sometimes negative effect. These results are largely robust under different statistical methods, additional control variables, and alternative measures of food security. Our research offers policy lessons for how to improve food security, and demonstrates how to resolve theoretically the long-standing dependency-modernization controversy that has informed the contemporary debate between the pro- and anti-globalization camps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on the prospects of bringing territorial rights and global justice under an unified theory. The unified theory will require to respect several norms including respecting all persons irrespective of group membership and self-determination of groups below global level. The author states that unifying the theories of territorial rights and global justice successfully would require squaring a circle.

Rawls's "law of peoples" (as described in both the essay and the later book) extends his political liberalism from the domestic to the international sphere. Does political liberalism provide a solid foundation, however, for global-justice claims? I argue here that it does not, because its approach to moral justification is impoverished. Specifically, international political liberalism envisions an overlapping consensus of liberal and decent-hierarchical peoples on a law of peoples that guards human rights and global peace, but it cannot offer principled reasons why the scope of toleration should not be further extended to include indecent peoples (e.g., those that fail to respect human rights) and the content of the law of peoples correspondingly weakened. A political liberal might counter that any such extension/weakening would be "unreasonable," but this response would be vacuous because political liberalism has no independent criterion of reasonableness: Rawls in his essay says that "whenever the scope of toleration is extended…the criteria of reasonableness are relaxed"—in other words, reasonableness is relative to the scope of toleration and the width and content of overlapping consensus—and political liberalism gives no compelling reasons why a narrower scope should be preferred to a broader one. I go on to consider two further responses that political liberals might offer, showing that they are also inadequate and point to the profound poverty of political liberalism and "Reformation liberalism" (Galston) more broadly, whether in the domestic or international political context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]