The authors articulate a global public standard for the normative legitimacy of global governance institutions. This standard can provide the basis for principled criticism of global governance institutions and guide reform efforts in circumstances in which people disagree deeply about the demands of global justice and the role that global governance institutions should play in meeting them.

Since its publication in 1990, Gender Trouble has become one of the key works of contemporary feminist theory, and an essential work for anyone interested in the study of gender, queer theory, or the politics of sexuality in culture.

Today democracy is both exalted as the "best means to realize human rights" and seen as weakened because of globalization and delegation of authority beyond the nation-state. In this provocative book, James Bohman argues that democracies face a period of renewal and transformation and that democracy itself needs redefinition according to a new transnational ideal. Democracy, he writes, should be rethought in the plural; it should no longer be understood as rule by the people, singular, with a specific territorial identification (...) and connotation, but as rule by peoples, across national boundaries. Bohman shows that this new conception of transnational democracy requires reexamination of such fundamental ideas as the people, the public, citizenship, human rights, and federalism, and he argues that it offers a feasible approach to realizing democracy in a globalized world.In his account, Bohman establishes the conceptual foundations of transnational democracy by examining in detail current theories of democracy beyond the nation-state and offers a deliberative alternative. He considers the importance of communicative freedom in the transnational public sphere, human rights as the normative basis of transnational democracy, and the European Union as a transnational polity. Finally, he examines the relationship between peace and democracy, concluding that peace requires democratization on interacting state and suprastate levels. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine both the work of Judith Butler on gender performativity and examples of how Butler's writings have been appropriated by certain other writers. I explore three areas in particular: the relation between performance and performativity in the work of Butler and her `adherents'; the developmental changes in Butler's argument between Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter; and the question of the effectiveness of the politics of parody. I argue that it is the ambiguities (...) in Butler's own several accounts of the distinction between performance and performativity that fuel the readings of the politics of performance as the province of the autonomous subject - a perspective at variance with Butler's own. In addition, I explore the deficiencies in Butler's account of politics, especially her denial of the significance of the context on the efficacy of political interventions. (shrink)

The argument of this paper is that the justification of democracy’s core principles of popular control over government in conditions of political equality, and the defense of them against paternalist alternatives, requires appeal to basic features of political decision-making and of human nature, respectively*its capacities and limitations*which are universal in their scope, and do not stop at borders. It follows that if a democratic form of government is appropriate anywhere, it must be so everywhere, though differences of social structure and (...) historical tradition may make it more difficult to establish and sustain in practice in some countries than in others. However, these common features do not entail uniformity. The fundamental freedoms necessary to popular selfgovernment in any form encourage diversity, and allow it to find full expression in the public sphere. Yet, there is a limit to the movements and beliefs that are compatible with democracy, and that comes when they reject one or other of its core principles. At the same time, some of democracy’s characteristic elements*freedoms of expression and association, electoral competition for office, majoritarian procedures*can serve to exacerbate societal conflict, especially though not only in newly democratizing countries. In such circumstances only the establishment of a process of inclusive dialogue, involving respect for difference and an understanding of the requirements of political equality, can serve to resolve such conflicts. In other words, a commitment to democracy’s core principles is needed to moderate the effects of some of its own typical procedures. Keywords: democratic principles; universalist; paternalism; rights; democracy; majoritarianism; minorities (Published: 4 December 2009) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 2, No. 4, 2009, pp. 281–296. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v2i4.2111. (shrink)

Translator's introduction -- Preface -- Part I: The aesthetics of politics -- Ten theses on politics -- Does democracy mean something? -- Who is the subject of the rights of man? -- Communism : from actuality to inactuality -- The people or the multitudes -- Bio-politics or politics -- September 11 and afterwards : a rupture in the symbolic order -- Of war as the supreme form of advanced plutocratic consensus -- Part II: The politics of aesthetics -- The aesthetic (...) revolution and its outcomes -- The paradoxes of political art -- The politics of literature -- The monument and its confidences or Deleuze and Art's capacity for resistance -- The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics -- Part III: Response to critics -- The usage of distinctions. (shrink)

Judith Butler has been arguably the most important gender theorist of the past 20 years. This edited volume draws leading international political theorists into dialogue with her political theory.

This book is vigorous in its arguments, displays an impressive historical sweep, and on several occasions gets in the perfect skewering criticism.

[Time, the fundamental dimension of our existence, has fascinated artists, philosophers, and scientists of every culture and every century. All of us can remember a moment as a child when time became a personal reality, when we realized what a "year" was, or asked ourselves when "now" happened. Common sense says time moves forward, never backward, from cradle to grave. Nevertheless, Einstein said that time is an illusion. Nature's laws, as he and Newton defined them, describe a timeless, deterministic universe (...) within which we can make predictions with complete certainty. In effect, these great physicists contended that time is reversible and thus meaningless. (shrink)

Recent work on the idea of political representation has challenged effectively orthodox accounts of constituency and interests. However, discussions of representation need to focus more on its dynamics prior to further work on its forms. To that end, the idea of the representative claim is advanced and defended. Focusing on the representative claim helps us to: link aesthetic and cultural representation with political representation; grasp the importance of performance to representation; take non-electoral representation seriously; and to underline the contingency and (...) contestability of all forms of representation. The article draws upon a range of sources and ideas to sketch a new, broader and more complex picture of the representative claim which — despite the complexity — helps us to reconnect representation theory to pressing real-world challenges. (shrink)

This latest work from one of the world's leading political philosophers will appeal to audiences from a variety of fields, including philosophy, political science, women's studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and communications studies.

Taking a thematic approach to Butler as a political thinker, this text develops Butler's theory of the political through an exploration of her politics of troubling.

This article argues for greater realism in political theory with respect to judgements about what politicians ought to do and how they ought to act. It shows that there are major problems in deducing what a given politician should do from the value commitments that are common to liberalism and it makes a case for recognizing the major role played by the context of action and particular agent involved. It distinguishes political virtue from moral virtues and argues that the ‘decisionist’ (...) features of political agency render evaluation a partly post hoc process. The article advocates a version of political realism that is rooted in an understanding of the distinctive character of political rule and that provides the basis for a contextualist but non-relativist account of ‘what is to be done’. (shrink)