An international research initiative run by the Development Learning Programme based at the University of Birmingham. See: www.dlprog.org/research/thinking-and-working-politically-community-of-practice.php . 9 By the same token, elites must have super-brains. 10 Since the mid 2000s, there has been a growing number of computer games and software programmes that claim to allow interested parties to experience what it is like to be a refugee or subject to a disaster. The Darfur content on Google Layers, for
Introduction Recent interventions in visual theory claim the camera affords the disenfranchised a form of political participation through the civil space opened up by the medium, a space where creator, subject, and spectator intersect ( Azoulay, 2008 ; de Laat, 2019 ). Beyond merely being a technology for producing pictures, the camera is understood as mediating social relations, and as such is an inherently political medium. Crucial to this formulation is visibility: being seen enables participation in a political community, even if only through a
This book argues for greater openness in the ways we approach human rights and international rights promotion, and in so doing brings some new understanding to old debates. Starting with the realities of abuse rather than the liberal architecture of rights, it casts human rights as a language for probing the political dimensions of suffering. Seen in this context, the predominant Western models of right generate a substantial but also problematic and not always emancipatory array of practices. These models are far from answering the questions about the nature of political community that are raised by the systemic infliction of suffering. Rather than a simple message from ‘us’ to ‘them’, then, rights promotion is a long and difficult conversation about the relationship between political organisations and suffering. Three case studies are explored: the Tiananmen Square massacre, East Timor's violent modern history and the circumstances of indigenous Australians. The purpose of these discussions is not to elaborate on a new theory of rights, but to work towards rights practices that are more responsive to the spectrum of injury that we inflict and endure.
This book addresses the major theoretical and practical issues of the forms of citizenship and access to citizenship in different types of polity, and the specification and justification of rights of non-citizen immigrants as well as non-resident citizens. It also addresses the conditions under which norms governing citizenship can legitimately vary. The book discusses the principles of including all affected interests (AAI), all subject to coercion (ASC) and all citizenship stakeholders (ACS). They complement each other because they serve distinct purposes of democratic inclusion. The book proposes that democratic inclusion principles specify a relation between an individual or group that has an inclusion claim and a political community that aims to achieve democratic legitimacy for its political decisions and institutions. It contextualizes the principle of stakeholder inclusion, which provides the best answer to the question of democratic boundaries of membership, by applying it to polities of different types. The book distinguishes state, local and regional polities and argues that they differ in their membership character. It examines how a principle of stakeholder inclusion applies to polities of different types. The book illustrates the difference between consensual and automatic modes of inclusion by considering the contrast between birthright acquisition of citizenship, which is generally automatic, and naturalization, which requires an application.
Introduction In his illuminating essay Rainer Bauböck advances a comprehensive approach to the question of how to determine membership of a democratic political community, that takes into account alternative theoretical principles, a variety of kinds of contemporary membership claims, and the complexities of current multiple levels of political structures. He identifies his all citizen stakeholders
law’s autonomy as an evolutionary process in which the emergence of law is tied to the political community of the citizens. This nexus is not self-evident. In particular, the dynamic nature of evolving legal frameworks in the transnational constellation raises the question of how plausible it still is for a “law in global disorder.”11 171 Postmodern legal theory as critical theory 171 In the era of Westphalian sovereignty, the notion that legal and constitutional processes were bound up with the polity was plausible. A law outside the polity was virtually
conditions continue to exist. But the trend is to greater mobility, and it may be that some state of greater mobility, short of extreme mobility, will pose greater challenges to the state than Bauböck allows. I use the archetypes of diaspora communities to critique his position on citizenship inside and outside the territory of the state. Diaspora communities may be disconnected from the political community of their state of residence even as they
, and for that reason accepts that all have equal voice in an inclusive political community. On the other hand, a deliberative ideal seeks the best reasons, and can do so only if some of the reasons citizens offer will have to be revised and even rejected in public discussion. My goal here is to show that this tension can be resolved if toleration becomes reflexive, that is, only if it is an ideal that is itself open to the demands of free and open public deliberation and the qualities of public communication that make that possible. Deliberative toleration is
notions of human rights draw indirectly or directly on some of our most deeply embedded presumptions and reference-points – for those of us in liberal democracies, particularly those cosmologies concerning the nature of the person and of political community. Questions about and concepts of the human as individual, of what is right, the state, justice, freedom, equality, and so on, flicker like a constellation of stars just off the edge of our fields of analysis – fading in and out, holding much, promising or claimed as anchorage, yet elusive and obscure. For many, the
punishments meted out for transgressions of Party rules. Through a ritualised practice of revolutionary justice called ‘People’s Trials’ (juicios populares), the Party regularly sentenced to death those deemed political or social enemies. Rural communities under Sendero control served as prime locations for staging the juicios where residents were expected to participate in the executions to show their loyalty and subjection. People’s Trials were a technique for forming a revolutionary public: both in the sense of creating a political community and transforming the people