At a time when many international relations scholars are qualifying their premature predictions of the withering of the state, Daniel Drezner's new book makes a compelling case for the continued centrality of the state in the process of globalization.

International institutions are being transformed by the twinned appearance of new non-governmental organizations and new technologies. How do these processes co-evolve? If we were limited to three words to describe the new interactive technologies of the Web, we would highlight the following logics: link, search, interact. Whereas in other systems these logics are additive, on the Web they can be recombinatory. Search, for example, can be conducted based on the structure of links, leading to new patterns of interaction, new links (...) and new methods of search. Of greatest interest are the kinds of search where you don’t know what you’re looking for but will recognize it when you find it. In short, innovation is promoted by networked organizational forms. New technologies do not determine these innovative outcomes, but they can facilitate them. The article explores the prospect of shifts among NGOs from autarky to collaboration, and from information transmission to knowledge networks in the virtual public sphere. (shrink)

The recent phenomenon of the export zone attracts scholarly attention primarily for its economic and political logics, yet it is as a cultural phenomenon that the Zone may ultimately signal its transformational role in the trajectory of state sovereignty and the global urban imagination. This article approaches the phenomenon of the Zone as a key location for understanding the social and cultural impact of globalization on urban space. It conceptually locates the trajectory of the export-oriented zone and its analogues to (...) understand how, in little over 40 years, the phenomenon of the Zone experienced a rapid and veritable institutionalization as part of the topography and imagination of globalization. The first part traces the contours of the Zone as a territorial strategy that re-scales national economic and political space and enables the networked models of distributed production so critical to the global economy. The second part critically supplements the standard account by re-thinking the Zone as an incipient urban form — the Ex-City — that incorporates classically modernist fantasies in the context of contemporary logics of sovereignty and accumulation. (shrink)

Syracuse University, NY, USA This paper seeks to demonstrate that hermeneutics is a powerful conceptual tool for exploring the current trend towards theorizing justice as a conversation. Specifically we explore the work of John Rawls in order to describe the particular variety of hermeneu tics at work in both 'political liberalism' and 'justice as fairness' and to critique this hermeneutics from the perspective of the ontological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Using the critique of Quinean pragmatism found in Joseph Rouse's epistemology, (...) we draw a par allel between the 'hermeneutics as translation' in Quine and Rawls's public reason. This parallel, we argue, helps us better understand the features and the limitations of political liberalism, especially when Rawls's hermeneutics is contrasted with the possibility of a theory of justice inspired by Gadamer. Key Words: democracy • dialogue • Gadamer • hermeneutics • justice • pluralism • Quine • Rawls. (shrink)