Weiwen at the Grassroots: China’s stability maintenance apparatus as a means of conflict resolution

This article assesses stability maintenance (weiwen) as a means of conflict resolution in China. It argues that the resolution of local disputes in China, particularly outside cities, is now being influenced and facilitated by the discourse and practice of stability maintenance, rather than legal methods and traditional mediation processes. This conclusion adds to the existing academic views of stability maintenance, which have previously emphasized social control to the exclusion of almost all else, and suggests that stability maintenance-focused conflict resolution may have practical benefits to Chinese citizens, given the state’s withdrawal from legal conflict resolution methods and its ambiguous attitude towards mediation.     

Effective citizenship in the cracks of neocorporatism

Citizenship is increasingly investigated not just in terms of rights and duties, but as contentious, evolving and continuously forged anew. This article analyzes an Israeli High Court ruling from 2007 to show how a liberal, human rights-based discourse enabled effective citizenship within neocorporatist frameworks for those outside the formal political community. The ruling, which extended Israeli labor law to Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, marks the breakdown of neocorporatism’s fundamental premise of congruence between labor force participation and participation in the political sphere, which engenders new opportunities for rejecting subjecthood and demanding inclusion. This marks a new development in the balance between the conflicting imperatives of economic inclusion and political exclusion in Israel’s relations with the Palestinians, and legitimizes practices of citizenship where formal political space is denied. It is not yet the ‘de-nationalizing’ of the state, but may be a step in decoupling effective citizenship from national belonging.     

Global democracy and feasibility

ABSTRACT

While methodological and metatheoretical questions pertaining to feasibility have been intensively discussed in the philosophical literature on justice in recent years, these discussions have not permeated the debate on global democracy. The overall aim of this article is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of importing some of the advancements made in this literature into the debate on global democracy, as well as to develop aspects that are relevant for explaining the role of feasibility in normative political theory. This is done by pursuing two arguments. First, to advance the work on the role of feasibility, we suggest as intuitively plausible two metatheoretical constraints on normative political theorizing – the ‘fitness constraint’ and the ‘functional constraint’ – which elucidate a number of aspects relevant in determining proper feasibility constraints for an account in political theory. Secondly, to illustrate the usefulness of this feasibility framework, we sketch an account of global democracy consisting of normative principles which respond differently to these aspects and thus are tied to different feasibility constraints as well as exemplify how it may be applied in practice.