Cosmopolitanism and Global Politics

This article discusses whether global politics are the best means for achieving cosmopolitan ends. It distinguishes the cosmopolitan goal of global obligations from the cosmopolitan politics of global governance. Evidence for cosmopolitanism in society and culture is not strong. In global politics states pursue their own material interests rather than cosmopolitan goals. Copenhagen and the financial crisis did not lead to global cosmopolitan politics as might have been hoped. The article argues that it is dangerous to continue to believe in cosmopolitan politics in such a context. Cosmopolitanism is better pursued through a politics that recognises material interests, conflict, is bottom‐up and based in what is happening, rather than top‐down and optimistic about cosmopolitan attitudes.     

The Speed of Global Flows and the Pace of Democratic Politics

The claim I want to make in this article is, in short, first, that democratic theory for the most part has seriously neglected the temporal preconditions of liberal democracy and, second, that it therefore fails to adequately grasp some fundamental aspects of the crisis of democratic self-determination in the contemporary global age. In its first part, the article seeks to demonstrate that the history of modernity is an ongoing process of social acceleration and that most of the phenomena we currently grasp under the concept of “globalization” can in fact best be understood as instances or consequences of the latest wave of social acceleration. In the second and main part of this article, the consequences of this acceleratory character of modernity for the plausibility, legitimacy and possibility of political democracy are systematically explored. The main argument is that the speed-up of society at first enabled and supported democratization, but beyond a certain critical threshold, the reverse effect occurs: the speed of social change and the dynamics of socioeconomic development threaten to undermine the proper functioning of democracy. Thus, it is my claim that democracy only works properly within a certain time- or “speed-frame” of social change. From this, I conclude that what is called for in the Age of Globalization is a new critical theory of acceleration, the contours of which I briefly sketch out in the third and last part of this essay.     

Polarization,Politics and Property Rights: Links Between Inequality and Growth

We argue that social polarization reduces the security ofproperty and contract rights and, through this channel,reduces growth. The first hypothesis is supported by cross-country evidence indicating that polarization in the form ofincome inequality, land inequality, and ethnic tensions isinversely related to a commonly-used index of the security ofcontractual and property rights. When the security of propertyrights is controlled for in cross-country growth regressions,the relationship between inequality and growth diminishesconsiderably. This and other evidence provides support for oursecond hypothesis, that inequality reduces growth in partthrough its effect on the security of property rights.     

Issue Definition, Information Processing, and the Politics of Global Warming

Past research has proposed various macrolevel theories of issue definition and agenda setting. However, we propose a microlevel theory of issue definition rooted in how individuals process information. We theorize that people process information about policy issues through a filter that emphasizes past assessments, ideology, background, social cues, and the continuing intrusion of new information. Most of these factors lead individual issue definitions toward stability. However, the introduction of an information signal of appropriate magnitude and character can produce punctuations in issue definition by individuals through time. Since the macrolevel definition of an issue is a type of aggregation of individual definitions, understanding how individuals define issues becomes a precursor to understanding issue definition at the system level. In evaluating the theory, we develop and evaluate a survey to study the issue definition process for individuals across multiple issues, and for global warming specifically. The survey also includes two embedded experiments to demonstrate the potential for punctuation in the issue-definition process for individuals and the system.     

Discursive Dislocation: Toward a Poststructuralist Theory of Crisis in Global Politics

In the discipline of International Relations (IR) and beyond, the concept of crisis is essentially contested, and one specific usage, it seems, is called into question by alternative uses of the term. The article develops the argument that crisis must not be misunderstood as exogenous to social construction; indeed, the very notion of crisis only makes sense if understood as produced entirely in what we will later specify as discourse. In this way, it can be illustrated how allegedly objective crises are expressions of particular configurations of social forms of power. The discourse theoretical notion of dislocation will be introduced in order to develop an understanding of crisis as a qualitative as well as constitutive feature of the social crisis. Crisis can in this sense be seen as a permanent attribute of the social, not some transitory condition that appears from time to time.     

The Everyday Spaces of Global Politics: Work,Leisure, Family

Despite many innovative contributions to international relations theory over the past two decades, a "common sense" view of global politics continues to persist both in the field and in the arenas of public policy and opinion. This article investigates the origins of this persistence and offers an alternative framework for the analysis of global politics that considers international relations as social relations produced by a broad array of actors in multiple spheres. Drawing on the work of Henri Lefebvre, the article investigates the role of alienation in everyday life and the resulting mystifications of the realities of global politics and goes on to consider the social spaces of work, leisure and the family as important arenas where these mystifications can be overcome and international relations be reclaimed from the realm of experts and statesmen.     

Gender, Violence and Global Politics: Contemporary Debates in Feminist Security Studies

In this essay I develop a critique of the war/peace dichotomy that is foundational to conventional approaches to IR through a review of three recent publications in the field of feminist security studies. These texts are Cynthia Enloe's (2007 ) Globalization and Militarism , David Roberts' (2008 ) Human Insecurity , and Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Women's Violence in Global Politics by Laura Sjoberg and Caron Gentry (2008 ). Drawing on the insights of these books, I ask first how violence is understood in global politics, with specific reference to the gendered disciplinary blindnesses that frequently characterise mainstream approaches. Second, I demonstrate how a focus on war and peace can neglect to take into account the politics of everyday violence: the violences of the in-between times that international politics recognises neither as 'war' nor 'peace' and the violences inherent to times of peace that are overlooked in the study of war. Finally, I argue that feminist security studies offers an important corrective to the foundational assumptions of IR, which themselves can perpetuate the very instances of violence that they seek to redress. If we accept the core insights of feminist security studies – the centrality of the human subject; the importance of particular configurations of masculinity and femininity; and the gendered conceptual framework that underpins the discipline of IR – we are encouraged to envisage a rather different politics of the global.     

Private Preferences for Public Goods: Towards a Model for the Interaction of Pressure Group and Electoral Politics

This essay explores two contrasting paradigms of collective action in the context of some observed anomalies in the development of the welfare states, focussing on private interest mod& of public expenditure growth versus models emphasising social choice and the degree of congruence between the political responsiveness of interest groups to the public expenditure crisis since the early 1970s, and the assumptions underpinning these models on political behaviour in the mixed economies. A bifurcation of the political system, resulting from the development of systems of functional interests representation alongside parliamentary and representative government, gives rise to a potential for strong governments to maintain regime support because of, rather than despite, the political fragmentation of majorities.     

私有财产权的宪法地位及其历史发展

我国 2 0 0 4年宪法修正案完善了对公民私有财产权的宪法保障 ,但仍存在若干不足之处。宪法意义上的公民财产权与民法意义上的公民财产权具有不同内涵。我们应通过与西方发展历程的比较 ,从历史的角度审视我国私有财产权宪法地位之变迁 ,并以建设社会主义法治国家为指向 ,探讨如何完善公民私有财产权的宪法保障。