Postcolonial science studies entails ostensibly contradictory critical and empirical commitments. Science studies scholars influenced by Bruno Latour and Isabelle Stengers embrace forms of realist, ...radical empiricism, while postcolonial studies scholars influenced by Jacques Derrida trace the limits of the knowable. This essay takes their common use of the term cosmopolitics as an unexpected point of departure for reconciling Derrida’s program with Stengers’s and Latour’s. I read Derrida’s critique of hospitality and Stengers’s and Latour’s ontological politics as necessary complements for conceiving a care-oriented subalternist cosmopolitics, a process of composing common worlds that remains attentive to the limits of representation.
Diplomacy is in trouble. With globalization come global problems. While we live in a twenty-first-century world of interdependence, we face seventeenth-century Westphalian political institutions with ...defined boundaries and separated responsibilities of nation-states. When we think of diplomacy, we are thinking of state-to-state relations; however, with sovereign obligation and national interest obsession, state-to-state negotiations often fall into "gridlocks"; international policy-making also suffers from "democratic deficits". David Held offered cosmopolitan democracy as the answer, but his "world government" thesis provides no realistic policy implications.
In very recent years, city-to-city ("trans-municipal") networks have received significant international recognition as cities are able to cooperate, with concrete actions, on a range of global issues. Surprisingly, scholars of international relations have largely neglected the role of cities in global governance. This paper argues for city diplomacy and "glocal" governance to fill the theoretical gap. It has two purposes: (1) to break the "conceptual jail" of regarding nation-states as the legitimate subject to manage world affairs, and open the door for cities and (2) to revisit the condition of cosmopolitan democracy, and offer a realistic model to revitalize the concept while bypassing the infeasibility of world government. In Part I, as I revisit Confucian philosophy da-tong (great unity), Rosenau's "sovereignty-free" actors and Athenian democracy, I argue that cities are our best hope to transcend nationality for the common well-being of humanity, connect local citizens to global public policy, and move towards cosmopolitan democracy. In Part II, drawing on Dahl's democratic criteria and DeBúrca's "democratic-striving approach", I will develop two "building blocks" of democracy at the global level - -equal participation and popular control. In Part III, with reference to the "building blocks", I will conduct a qualitative analysis to evaluate the cosmopolitan characteristics of C40 and develop political justifications for "trans-municipal networks".
In modernity, the concept of cosmopolitanism has changed from an intellectual ethos to a vision of an institutionally embedded global political consciousness. The central problem that troubles ...cosmopolitanism from its moment of inception in 18th-century philosophy to the globalized present is whether we live in a world that is interconnected enough to generate institutions that have a global regulatory reach and a global form of solidarity that can influence their functioning. Examination of Kant's pre-nationalist cosmopolitanism, Marx's postnationalist cosmopolitanism, and decolonizing socialist nationalism indicates the normative attraction of the nation as a mode of solidarity. Contemporary arguments about new cosmopolitanisms focusing on the rise of transnational networks of global cities, postnational social formations created by migrant and diasporic flows and Habermas's recent revival of Kant's project of cosmopolitan democracy have likewise failed to address the persistence of nationalism as a normative force within the field of uneven globalization.
While a number of prominent researchers have recently turned their attention to the likelihood or desirability of full world government, such an ideal has little current support in civic and popular ...discourse. This article seeks to identify some factors possibly reinforcing such ‘globoscepticism’. After first discussing why it should not be seen as prima facie absurd to support global political integration, and noting widespread popular support in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it turns to some findings on the sources of Euroscepticism. This phenomenon involves negative attitudes expressed by political elites and ordinary citizens towards European Union integration. Also considered are the determinants of attitudes towards international trade liberalisation. Insights from both areas can be applied to a preliminary exploration of globoscepticism. Specifically, they can enrich an analysis of domestic biases which naturally arise and are reinforced within a sovereign states system, and which tend to diminish support for comprehensive projects beyond the state. These pose challenges that must be addressed by academic advocates of full global integration, as well as advocates of still-ambitious but far less comprehensive projects of suprastate institution building.
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