The trend in government and public policy towards evidence-based policy making has recently been the subject of criticism from authors such as Ian Sanderson who argue that the insights of complexity ...theory undermine the claims of evidence that these forms of policy design advocate. While taking on board the primary claim of this critique, this article examines the contribution of complexity theory in more detail to suggest that the epistemological obstacles that complexity science identifies also challenge the kind of pragmatic, deliberative model that Sanderson prefers. Instead, it examines the work of Michael Freeden on failure and Michel Foucault on error to demonstrate the ways in which approaches that are less wedded to epistemological certainty can enable policy makers to think more creatively about the complex terrain they must navigate and develop more innovative and less risk-averse forms of political action.
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In recent years radical democracy has become a prominent perspective in contemporary political theory. However, radical democracy involves numerous theoretical arguments and interpretations of ...democracy as can be witnessed in the work of some theorists who have been influential on radical democratic politics such as William Connolly, Judith Butler and Wendy Brown. Although all of these theorists agree that there are serious problems in the dominant liberal conceptions of democracy, some of them seem reluctant to criticise the workings of democracy in favour of analysis of the limitations of liberalism. While radical democrats need to recognise these limitations, the article contends that the main elements of modern democracy such as popular sovereignty, voting, representation and the rule of law also need to be subjected to critical scrutiny. Otherwise the work of theorists such as Connolly, Butler and Brown tends to produce a melancholic lament for democracy lost which draws attention away from the idea of the ‘constitutive failure’ of democracy that animates some of the radical democratic canon of contemporary European theorists. In short, the article contends that radical democratic theorists need to recognise that democracy is not sacrosanct.
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In May 2017, the Uluru Statement from the Heart was released, providing an Indigenous response to debates on recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian ...constitution. The document advocated for a “Makarrata Commission,” which would oversee truth telling and agreement making. This essay analyzes the concept of Makarrata as it has emerged in the context of Indigenous–settler relations in Australia and argues for a deeper engagement of non-Indigenous people with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander concepts and practices. By extending some of the methods of comparative political theory to incorporate endogenous as well as exogenous comparisons, the article demonstrates the ways in which Makarrata is likely to contribute to continuing contestation and disagreement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples. While the Uluru Statement marked a significant point in the Australian recognition debate because it reflected a relatively consensual Indigenous message articulated on its own terms, the article suggests that “Makarrata” must not be appropriated into a benign settler discourse of reconciliation, if the concept’s potential to inform substantive change in Indigenous–settler relations is to be realized.
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This unique text challenges the notion that absence of conflict is the foundation and norm of a stable political environment. Combining complexity theory and the notion of signature with case ...studies, it argues that political processes need to be understood within their social and cultural contexts. It thus develops the idea of enduring conflict, referring to both the enduring nature of political conflict and the endurance of people in conflict-ridden societies, looking at countries involved in conflict transformation, such as Northern Ireland, Cambodia, Indonesia, and South Africa. Examining debates around trauma, memory, and reconciliation, the work shows how conflicts are so socially and culturally ingrained and protracted that political agreements alone cannot bring substantive change. In addition, key texts, such as peace agreements, along with interviews of politicians, participants, and NGOs help identify the conditions under which notions like peace, democracy, and conflict resolution can even be conceived – let alone implemented. This innovative text is a significant contribution to the literature as it highlights the limitations of conflict resolution strategies and identifies the issues that pertain to conflicts throughout global politics. Written in an accessible manner, it will be highly attractive to students in conflict processes, peace studies, and international relations theory.
Critics of global democracy have often claimed that the social and political conditions necessary for democracy to function are not met at the global level, and are unlikely to be in the foreseeable ...future. Such claims are usually developed with reference to national democratic institutions, and the social conditions within national democratic societies that have proved important in sustaining them. Although advocates of global democracy have contested such sceptical conclusions, they have tended to accept the method of reasoning from national to global contexts on which they are based. This article critiques this method of argument, showing that it is both highly idealised in its characterisation of national democratic practice, and overly state-centric in its assumptions about possible institutional forms that global democracy might take. We suggest that if aspiring global democrats – and their critics – are to derive useful lessons from social struggles to create and sustain democracy within nation states, a less idealised and institutionally prescriptive approach to drawing global lessons from national experience is required. We illustrate one possible such approach with reference to cases from both national and global levels, in which imperfect yet meaningful democratic practices have survived under highly inhospitable – and widely varying – conditions.
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In April 2015, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott called on European leaders to respond to the migration and refugee crisis in the Mediterranean by ‘stopping the boats’ in order to prevent ...further deaths. This suggestion resonated with the European Union Commission’s newly articulated commitment to both enhancing border security and saving lives. This article charts the increasing entanglement of securitisation and humanitarianism in the context of transnational border control and migration management. The analysis traces the global phenomenon of humanitarian border security alongside a series of spatial dislocations and temporal deferrals of ‘the border’ in both European and Australian contexts. While discourses of humanitarian borders operate according to a purportedly universal and therefore borderless logic of ‘saving lives’, the subjectivity of the ‘irregular’ migrant in need of rescue is one that is produced as spatially and temporally exceptional — the imperative is always to act in the here and the now — and therefore knowable, governable and ‘bordered’.
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The idea of a rational consensus has become an increasingly controversial dimension of recent democratic theory as radical democratic theorists have challenged the ways in which liberal democracies ...deal with political disagreement and contestation. As a result, several theorists within the liberal tradition have attempted to incorporate models of dissent in their democratic arguments but this paper contends that they tend to result in forms of majoritarianism or proceduralism which reflect the original limitations that inspired the radical democratic critique. A more useful approach is one that recognises that contestation is inherent to democratic politics and understands that the paradox of democracy is the need to embrace the impossibility of establishing rational consensus in democratic practice.
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More-than-human approaches to borders unsettle the anthropocentric reading of borders and bordering practices. They call for radically different imaginings of shared vulnerabilities and co-existence ...on the border. What remains marginal in these discussions is the way in which more-than-human borders continue to neglect social differences and unequal power relations among different (human) individuals. The question is not simply about the hierarchy between human and non-human lives, but how the construction of such binaries continues to privilege the life of certain humans while exposing their pervasive violence on others. Using the case of the development of Trans Frontier Conservation Areas (TFCAs) in southern Africa, we argue that limiting the voice of the human in our readings of the border to create space for non-humans could draw attention away from significant political analysis of mobility privileges and practices of ongoing colonisation in the construction of more-than-human spaces. By drawing on Henri Bergson's political philosophy of becoming and of open and closed societies, we suggest that more-than-human borders can be re-thought in terms of Bergson's reading of movement, qualitative multiplicity, and open societies - a language that resists any forms of closure and a linear understanding of progress and time. A close examination of TFCAs suggests that practices that seek to enable connectivity and mobility across time and space can turn borders into spatio-temporal chokepoints, which preserve the familiar logics of colonisation and exclusionary bordering.
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