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The ascent of globalisation captures the sweeping drama of postwar globalisation through intimate portraits of twenty of its key architects. These profiles provide insights into what inspired these pioneers of globalisation — the beliefs they each imbibed in their youth, the formative experiences that shaped their ideas and their contributions to the global architecture. Engaging anecdotes and telling personal details, many of which have never been told, enliven each of the stories, as well as the behind-the-scenes dramas that accompanied the creation of institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, UN and World Trade Organization and the informal governance structures that are part of the postwar global architecture. Their legacies are critically examined, both their successes and their disappointments: a global financial system that is fragile and unstable; an international trading system that is unfair; the unintended consequences of largely unregulated transnational capital; and dysfunction that plagues institutions like the European Union and the United Nations. The book ends by examining what implications the flawed architecture may have for the future of globalisation.

This book examines the contribution of different Christian traditions to the waves of democratisation that have swept various parts of the world in recent decades, offering an historical overview of Christianity's engagement with the development of democracy, before focusing in detail on the period since the 1970s. Successive chapters deal with: the Roman Catholic conversion to democracy and the contribution of that church to democratisation; the Eastern Orthodox ‘hesitation’ about democracy; the alleged threat to American democracy posed by the politicisation of conservative Protestantism; and the likely impact on democratic development of the global expansion of Pentecostalism. The author draws out several common themes from the analysis of these case studies, the most important of which is the ‘liberal-democracy paradox’. This ensures that there will always be tensions between faiths which proclaim some notion of absolute truth and political order, and which are also rooted in the ideas of compromise, negotiation and bargaining.

Citizen now offers a comprehensive description of the composition and behavior of the Millennial Generation, an explanation and critique of the study of youth engagement, and a unique approach and methodology for appreciating how and why “citizen now” engages in politics and democracy. The text provides readers with a complete picture of the demographics and participation of Millennials and, through original analysis of newspaper content, a depiction of the frame through which the generation has been viewed. Although Millennials have been the object of much study and despite the despite the fairly common approach and methodology utilized by scholars, contrasting theoretical frameworks have limited our appreciation of their connection to politics. Unlike much of the research in this field, Citizen now considers youth political participation from the perspective of young adults themselves – specifically, young adults who’ve organized around an issue of great concern to Millennials, their economic well-being. By focusing not only on the generation’s actions but on the strategies and goals of these youth-led groups, the text offers both a path for future research and practical guidance on how to engage “citizen now” in politics and democracy.

This book explores the political implications of violence and alterity (radical difference) for the practice of democracy, and reformulates the possibility of community that democracy is said to entail. Most significantly, contributors intervene in traditional democratic theory by contesting the widely held assumption that increased inclusion, tolerance and cultural recognition are democracy's sufficient conditions. Rather than simply inquiring how best to expand the ‘demos’, they investigate how claims to self-determination, identity and sovereignty are a problem for democracy, and how, paradoxically, alterity may be its greatest strength. Contributions include an appeal to the tension between fear and love in the face of anti-Semitism in Poland, injunctions to rethink the identity-difference binary and the ideal of ‘mutual recognition’ that dominate liberal-democratic thought, critiques of the canonical ‘we’ which constitutes the democratic community, and a call for an ethics and a politics of ‘dissensus’ in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression. The contributors mobilise some of the most powerful critical insights emerging across the social sciences and humanities—from anthropology, sociology, critical legal studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, critical race theory and post-colonial studies—to reconsider the meaning and the possibility of ‘democracy’ in the face of its contemporary crisis.

This book provides a critical investigation of what has been termed the ‘global justice movement’. Through a detailed study of a grassroots peasants' network in Asia (People's Global Action); an international trade union network (the International Federation of Chemical, Energy, Mining and General Workers); and the Social Forum process, it analyses some of the global justice movement's component parts, operational networks and their respective dynamics, strategies and practices. The authors argue that the emergence of new globally connected forms of collective action against neoliberal globalisation are indicative of a range of variously place-specific forms of political agency that coalesce across geographic space at particular times, in specific places and in a variety of ways. They also argue that, rather than being indicative of a coherent ‘movement’, such forms of political agency contain many political and geographical fissures and fault-lines, and are best conceived of as ‘global justice networks’: overlapping, interacting, competing and differentially placed and resourced networks that articulate demands for social, economic and environmental justice. Such networks, and the social movements that comprise them, characterise emergent forms of trans-national political agency. The authors argue that the role of key geographical concepts of space, place and scale are crucial to an understanding of the operational dynamics of such networks. Such an analysis challenges key current assumptions in the literature about the emergence of a global civil society.

Democracy has become a victim of its own success: the more that global societies wish to be seen as ‘democratic’, the more inflated the term becomes and the less meaning it has. We must avoid looking to democracy as a way of achieving personal autonomy and meaningful lives, and return to an understanding of democracy as a means of diffusing power between political agents. This updated, new edition examines some of the philosophical and theoretical issues underlying the ‘democratic project’ that increasingly dominates the fields of comparative development and international relations. The first concern presented here is normative (and, to a certain degree, epistemological): as democracy becomes more widely accepted as the political currency of legitimacy, the more broadly it is defined. But as agreement decreases regarding the definition of democracy, the less we are able to evaluate how it is working, or indeed whether it is working at all. What are the philosophical justifications presented for such an expansion of interpretation, and what are the political reasons underlying it? The second issue is causal: what are the claims being made regarding how best to secure a democratic system in developing states? To what extent do our beliefs and expectations of how political relations ought to be governed distort our understanding of how democratic societies do in fact emerge; and, conversely, to what extent does our understanding of how democracy manifests itself temper our conception of what ought to be?

Whether called pressure groups, NGOs, social movement organisations or organised civil society, the value of ‘groups’ to the policy process, to economic growth, to governance, to political representation and to democracy has always been contested. However, there seems to be a contemporary resurgence in this debate, largely centred on their democratising potential: can groups effectively link citizens to political institutions and policy processes? Are groups an antidote to emerging democratic deficits? Or do they themselves face challenges in demonstrating their legitimacy and representativeness? This book debates the democratic potential and practice of groups, focusing on the vibrancy of internal democracies, and modes of accountability with those who join such groups and to the constituencies they advocate for. It draws on literatures covering national, European and global levels, and presents empirical material from the UK and Australia.

Focusing on professional politicians, this book investigates the interrelationship between political career patterns and political institutions in two of the most widely discussed cases of regionalism: Catalonia and Scotland. It deals with two different yet closely related sets of questions. Firstly, how do professional politicians pursue their careers in the regional context? And secondly, how do they shape and reshape the political institutions in which they pursue these careers? The book is based on extensive empirical research including a comprehensive data set on the careers of Catalan and Scottish parliamentarians, systematic surveys of regional representatives as well as in-depth interviews with a wide range of politicians and experts in both regions. Exploring the effects of political professionalisation on regional democracy, it goes beyond traditional studies of regionalism and decentralization, while its focus on the regional career arena introduces a territorial dimension to the study of political careers.

This book provides a critical, conceptual-historical analysis of democracy at the United Nations, detailed in four ‘visions’ of democracy: civilization, elections, governance and developmental democracy. ‘I know it when I see it’ were the famous words of US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart on defining obscenity. It is with the same conviction and (un)certainty that liberal peacebuilders and democracy promoters have used democracy to achieve both the immediate goals of peacekeeping and the broader, global mission of the UN. Today, democracy may have gained an international dimension, yet its success as an organizational practice depends on how it has been defined. Drawing on political theory and democratization scholarship, the book questions the meaning of this well-‘known’ idea. It analyses the way in which the UN, through its Secretary-General, relevant agencies and organizational practices, have thought about, conceptualized and used democracy. The book shows that while the idea of democracy's ‘civilizing’ nature has played a prominent part in its use by the UN, an early focus on sovereignty and self-determination delayed the emergence of the democracy agenda until the 1990s. Today, a comprehensive democracy agenda incorporates not only elections but a broad range of liberal-democratic institutions. Despite this, the agenda is at an impasse, both practically and philosophically. The book questions whether an extension of the UN democracy agenda to include ‘developmental democracy’ is feasible.