The New Transnational Activism shows how even the most prosaic activities can assume broader political meanings when they provide ordinary people with the experience of crossing transnational space. This means that we cannot be satisfied with defining transnational activists through the ways they think. The defining feature of transnationalism in this book is relational, and not cognitive. This emphasis on activism's relational structure means that even as they make transnational claims, transnational activists draw on the resources, the networks, and the (...) opportunities in which they are embedded, and only then - if at all - on more distant transnational links. But we can no more sharply draw a line between domestic and international politics in studying transnational activism than we could ignore local politics in studying its national equivalent. Understanding the processes that link the local, the national and the international is the major undertaking of the book. (shrink)

Sovereignty and the sovereign state are often seen as anachronisms; Globalization and Sovereignty challenges this view. Jean L. Cohen analyzes the new sovereignty regime emergent since the 1990s evidenced by the discourses and practice of human rights, humanitarian intervention, transformative occupation, and the UN targeted sanctions regime that blacklists alleged terrorists. Presenting a systematic theory of sovereignty and its transformation in international law and politics, Cohen argues for the continued importance of sovereign equality. She offers a theory of a dualistic (...) world order comprised of an international society of states, and a global political community in which human rights and global governance institutions affect the law, policies, and political culture of sovereign states. She advocates the constitutionalization of these institutions, within the framework of constitutional pluralism. This book will appeal to students of international political theory and law, political scientists, sociologists, legal historians, and theorists of constitutionalism. (shrink)

The goal of this article is to show that mainstream liberal accounts of civil disobedience fail to fully capture the latter’s specific characteristics as a genuinely political and democratic practice of contestation that is not reducible to an ethical or legal understanding either in terms of individual conscience or of fidelity to the rule of law. In developing this account in more detail, I first define civil disobedience with an aim of spelling out why the standard liberal model, while providing (...) a useful starting point, ultimately leads to an overly constrained, domesticated and sanitized understanding of this complex political practice. Second, I place the political practice of civil disobedience between two opposing poles: symbolic politics and real confrontation. I argue that the irreducible tension between these poles precisely accounts for its politicizing and democratizing potential. Finally, I briefly examine the role of civil disobedience in representative democracies, addressing a series of recent challenges made in response to this radically democratic understanding of disobedience. (shrink)

In 1992, the Frankfurt scholar Ingeborg Maus launched a polemical attack against then current narratives of democratic protest, objecting to the languages of ‘resistance’ or ‘civil disobedience’ as defensive, servile and insufficiently transformative. This article explores in how far the language of constituent power can be adopted as an alternative justificatory strategy for civil disobedience in transnational protests. In contrast to current approaches that look at states as agents of international civil disobedience-as-constituent power, I suggest we look at political movements. (...) I focus on the example of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025 which understands itself as a pan-European movement of civil disobedience, at the same time working towards an articulation and exercise of constituent power among the people of Europe. In the final section, I sharpen the criteria for the invocation of constituent power in transnational protest in distinguishing between its articulation, activation and... (shrink)

For Kant, the contents of cosmopolitan law are to be ‘limited’ to non-citizens' subjective rights to hospitality. Although hospitality yields universal and far-reaching communicative rights, its limits may seem overly restrictive at first. I argue that this narrow focus is intended to fend off justifications for colonial occupation that could otherwise draw support from Kant's own doctrine of private law. Kantian hospitality is further limited in that it does not cover all forms of communicative exchange. As can be shown from (...) his endorsement of China's and Japan's protectionist policies, Kant is not averse to limiting cosmopolitan citizens' commercial speech. In conclusion, I discuss rivalling interpretations of Kant's justification of hospitality. I argue that this justification cannot rest exclusively on the innate human right to freedom, but must draw on facts about the world as well. (shrink)

The central argument developed in this essay is that today we are seeing a proliferation of normative orders where once state normativity ruled and the dominant logic was toward producing a unitary normative framing. One synthesizing image we might use to capture these dynamics is that of a movement from centripetal nation-state articulation to a centrifugal multiplication of specialized assemblages. This multiplication in turn can lead to a sort of simplification of normative structures insofar as: these assemblages are partial and (...) often highly specialized formations centered in particular utilities and purposes. The valence of these particular utilities and purposes can range from the search for justice to narrow self-interest . While this is still a minor process in the larger scale of our geopolity, it signals the beginning of a multi-sited, though partial, disruption of its existing formal architecture. This raises questions about the future of crucial frameworks through which modern societies, economies, and polities have operated: the social contract of liberal states, social democracy as we have come to understand it, modern citizenship, and the formal mechanisms that render certain claims legitimate and others illegitimate in liberal democracies. These frameworks have held together complex interdependencies between rights and obligations, power and the law, wealth and poverty, allegiance and exit.Keywords: assemblages; normative; globalization; denationalization; centripetal; centrifugal; utilities; logics; liberal state; claims. (shrink)