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Explores how grief can help to negotiate our loss of affect for liberal democracy
Human Rights, or Citizenship? questions whether the evident displacement of the concept of the citizen by human rights can lead us to a more equitable politics.
Democracy is in shambles economically and politically. The recent economic meltdown in Europe and the U.S. has substituted democratic deliberation with technocratic decisions. In Athens, Madrid, Lisbon, New York, Pittsburgh or Istanbul, protesters have denounced the incapacity and unwillingness of elected officials to heed to their voices. While the diagnosis of our political-economic illness has been established, remedies are hard to come. What can we do to restore our broken democracy? Which modes of political participation are likely to have an impact? And what are the loci of political innovation in the wake of the crisis? It is with these questions that Reclaiming Democracy engages. We ...
This book traces and conceptualises the changing notion of democracy and demonstrates how democracy promotion finds itself at the heart of contemporary international discourses and policies. Democracy promotion is widely considered to constitute a hypocritical and failed ‘grand international narrative’ of the 1990s and has allegedly been replaced by other, more pressing and academically more captivating concerns, such as conflict management, statebuilding and climate change. This book challenges this position and argues that the core notions of democracy promotion, such as empowerment, inclusion and responsiveness, are a key concern of contemporary international policymakers. Drawing on ...
Political Theory and the Displacement of Politics, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life. As Bonnie Honig writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, "the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and relational practices in which diverse groups and individuals set and reset the terms of living together as equals." By rethinking the established relation between politics and political theory, Honig argues that political theorists of oppo...
This book is about a distinctive ‘abyssal’ approach to the crisis of modernity. In this framing, influenced by contemporary critical Black studies, another understanding of the world of modernity is foregrounded – a world violently forged through the projects of Indigenous dispossession, chattel slavery and colonial world-making. Modern and colonial world-making violently forged the ‘human’ by dividing those with ontological security from those without, and by carving out the ‘world’ in a fixed grid of space and time, delineating a linear temporality of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. The distinctiveness of abyssal thought is that it inverts the stakes of critique and bri...
The last two decades have seen the remarkable rise to dominance of human-centred understandings of the world. Indeed, it is now rare to read any analysis of insecurity, conflict or development which does not discuss the need to 'empower' or 'capacity-build' local individuals or communities. In this path-breaking book, Chandler presents a radical challenge to such approaches, arguing that the solutions to the world's problems are now not perceived to lie within external structures of economic, political and social relations, but instead with individuals and groups who are often seen to be the most marginal and powerless. This fundamental change has gone hand-in-hand with the shift from state-based to society-based understandings of the world. Chandler provocatively argues that human-centred approaches have limited rather than expanded the transformative possibilities available to us, and if real change is to be achieved - both at a local and a global level - then a radical re-think in Western thought is required.
This book provides a conceptual and methodological approach for researchers evaluating governance and policy in the face of complexity, and demonstrates the application of this approach across different governance and policy contexts. It fills a significant gap in the literature on governance, and proposes a theoretical focus on coordination to enable the assessment of multi-tier, cross-sector governance institutions and policy. It also introduces a range of applications for the proposed approach, including two case studies of governance and policy for the built environment and health services. The book introduces, analyses and draws from a range of perspectives in political economy, political science, policy analysis and evaluation. It also engages with longstanding debates in political economy about states and markets, which are largely overlooked by political science analyses of coordination challenges in governance. The book will appeal to scholars and students of governance, public policy and political science.
The Ancient Greek notion of agonism, meaning struggle, has been revived in radical legal and political theory to rethematize class conflict and to conceptualize the conditions of possibility of freedom and social transformation in contemporary society. Insisting that what is ultimately at stake in politics are the terms in which social conflict is represented, agonists highlight the importance of the strategic, affective and aesthetic aspects of politics for democratic praxis. This volume examines the implications of this critical perspective for understanding law and considers how law serves either to sustain or curtail the democratic agon. While sharing a critical perspective on the delibe...
A figure of enduring ingenuity, the nation has for centuries played a part on the socio-political stage. Whether centre stage or background scenery, it has featured in violent tragedies, revolutionary drama and nostalgic fable. Today, the nation is cast simultaneously in the roles of villain and hero. While it is renounced by those advocating trans-national, post-national and cosmopolitan forms of belonging, it has lately also been asserted as the solution to various social failures in liberal democracies. This appears to leave us with two alternatives: to jettison the nation in order to move towards a less parochial world, a world in which new forms of belonging underpin more inclusive poli...