In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological ...

This text was prepared for presentation in Nagoya, Japan, in 2010. Its aim was to explore a dialogue with Asians toward a cosmopolitan sociology. Beginning from the idea of entangled modernities which threaten their own foundations, Ulrich Beck advocated a complete conceptual innovation of sociology in order to better comprehend the fundamental fragility and mutability of societal dynamics shaped by the globalization of capital and risks today. More specifically, he proposed a cosmopolitan turn of sociology: first, by (...) criticizing methodological nationalism; second, by introducing the concept of cosmopolitization; third, by re-mapping social inequalities; fourth, by discussing risk society in the context of East Asian development; and fifth and finally, by proposing a cosmopolitan vision. Along this line, Beck attempted an overview of the researches done on second modern transformation in East Asia and suggested that an active dialogue may be possible when Asians begin to see the West from their perspectives rather than being caught in the Euro-centric and West-hegemonic presuppositions. (shrink)

If Europe wants to overcome its current crisis, it urgently needs to develop a new political vision and a new concept for political integration. By focusing on the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe, this article outlines such a political vision for Europe. To this end, it first suggests reformulating the concept of cosmopolitanism in such a way that it is not tied to the ‘cosmos’ or the ‘globe’. With the aid of such a generalized concept of cosmopolitanism (...) it then presents a novel, cosmopolitan approach to European integration that is no longer concerned with harmonizing rules and eliminating (national) differences, but with recognizing them. Finally, it outlines a new, post-national model of democracy for Europe that no longer disenfranchises citizens and instead gives them an active role in European decision-making processes. (shrink)

Sociology was born as an attempt to delimit an object of investigation offered by society as a social reality. The ambition was that of "treating the social facts as things" (Durkheim) or of understanding and explaining the social relations by respecting an "axiological neutrality" (Max Weber). Today, however, we are in the presence of a new kind of sociologists, and they are by no means the less popular ones, who are not trying to avoid assessments in their analysis of the (...) present social world. I have in mind especially two sociologists, Ulrich Beck (Munich) and David Held (London). I will discuss in particular the view of sociology presented in a recent book of Ulrich Beck ( Macht und Gegenmacht im globalen Zeitalter , 2002, translated into French under the title Pouvoir et contre-pouvoir à l'ère de la mondialisation , 2003), and I will show some analogies between Beck and Held. Finally, I will try to identify the points that make the present sociological epistemology different from that of the great founders of this science. (shrink)

This article aims at an active dialogue between Ulrich Beck and East Asia with respect to cosmopolitan imagination. Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology requires a reflective cosmopolitan publicness to cope with various kinds of global risks. We therefore extract three different layers of publicness from neo-Confucianism – survival-oriented, deliberative, and ecological – and argue that Beck’s cosmopolitan vision can be better conceptualized when properly linked to, or founded upon, the Tianxiaweigong normative potentials of neo-Confucianism. (...) In so doing our intention is to make Beck’s implicit sensibilities and the implicit Asian orientations explicit, as a double process of cosmopolitan self-reflection and dialogue. We also draw attention to the analysis of the cosmopolitan actor in East Asia. Finally, we note that the cosmopolitan future of East Asia still remains uncertain and that reconciling global risk politics, national interests and cosmopolitan morality presents a big challenge to second modern transformation. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness, liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is a (...) kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness , liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is (...) a kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

The concept of the national is often perceived, both in public and academic discourse as the central obstacle for the realization of cosmopolitan orientations. Consequently, debates about the nation tend to revolve around its persistence or its demise. We depart from this either-or perspective by investigating the formation of the ‘cosmopolitan nation’ as a facet of world risk society. Modern collectivities are increasingly preoccupied with debating, preventing and managing risks. However, unlike earlier manifestations of risk characterized by daring (...) actions or predictability models, global risks can no longer be calculated or forecast. Accordingly, more influence accrues to the perception of risk, largely constructed by media representations. Cosmopolitanized risk collectivities are engendered through the anticipation of endangered futures which are, for the most part, communicated through an increasingly global media scape. While global media events produce shared exposure, risk conceptions retain distinctive political-cultural features as their respective meanings are prefigured by path-dependent pasts. Nevertheless, the promulgation of risk societies, we argue, results in a reimagination of nationhood which takes place in the context of: global norms (e.g. human rights); globalized markets; transnational migrations; global generations and their embeddedness in civil society movements; and the local interpenetration of world religions to name but a few of the global backdrops shaping new associational intersections. We develop our argument in four interrelated steps. Contrary to essentialized notions of nationalism or universal versions of cosmopolitanism, we address the cosmopolitan reconfiguration of nationhood by differentiating between presumptions of thick belonging and the actual proliferation of cosmopolitan affiliations. In a second step we overcome the territorial fixation of the social sciences by shifting our attention to temporal dimensions, with a particular focus on competing conceptions of the future. In a third step we demonstrate how these cosmopolitan transformations of nationhood are taking place in the context of a world risk society regime that marshals a set of cosmopolitan imperatives situating the global other in our midst. In a fourth step we illustrate these developments by exploring how the mediatization of risk, and concomitant notions of the future, contribute to the reimagination of cosmopolitan risk collectivities. (shrink)

In this article I want to outline an argument for a New Critical Theory with a cosmopolitan intent. Its main purpose is to undermine one of the most powerful beliefs of our time concerning society and politics. This belief is the notion that “modern society” and “modern politics” are to be understood as society and politics organized around the nation‐state, equating society with the national imagination of society. There are two aspects to this body of beliefs: what I call (...) the “national perspective” of social actors, and the “methodological nationalism” of scientific observers. The distinction between these two perspectives is important because there is no logical co‐implication between them, only an interconnected genesis and history. (shrink)

Few writers' unfinished works are considered among their most important, but such is the case with Merleau-Ponty's _The Visible and the Invisible_. What exists of it is a mere beginning, yet it bridged modernism and postmodernism in philosophy. Low uses material from some of Merleau-Ponty's later works as the basis for completion. Working from this material and the philosopher's own outline, Low presents how this important work would have looked had Merleau-Ponty lived to complete it.

In the book's preface, Low writes: <p" am fully aware that every exposition is an interpretation, and i believe that merleau-ponty was surely aware of this as ...

The article analyses practices, perceptions and political dramatizations of bone marrow donation in Cyprus. Based on empirical data from an ethnographic study on practices of organ and bone marrow transplantation in postcolonial Cyprus, forms of oppositional biopolitics are analysed that are not bound by the modern, étatist regime of governing populations but capitalize on new developments in biomedicine, on new political movements, as well as on transformations in the political sphere. These reconfigurations are interpreted as instances of an emerging bio-subpolitics (...) that transcends national borders and produces new complexities, interrelations, associations and social forms that come into being alongside biomedicine. At the same time, these developments co-produce cosmopolitan citizens and new subjectivities, transcending nationally bound regimes of political deliberation and identification. These forms of biopolitics mobilize local historical experiences and take advantage of affordances provided by biomedical platforms operating on a global scale that make available an opportunity structure for a cosmopolitan bio-subpolitics. (shrink)

This paper summarizes Ervin Laszlo’s worldview in The Systems View of the World: A Holistic Vision for Our Time.1 Laszlo claims that current discoveries in the sciences have led to a different model of the physical world, human nature, and human culture. Instead of the models formulated during the Enlightenment, according Systems thinkers “systems interact with systems and collaboratively form suprasystems”. This view has led to a reexamination of: 1) each academic discipline; 2) the relationship between disciplines; 3) the (...) nature of theory and its relation to practice; 4) the relationship between religion and the sciences; 5) of the nature of the social sciences and our ability to develop a universal, normative ethic; 6) the relation between reasoning, emotion and imagination. The evolution of the reflective self-consciousness unique to homo sapiens has led to the formation of cultures. Cultures must be understood assuprasystems that emerged from natural systems and are dependent upon them. Given this universal natural foundation, systems thinkers are recognizing the common patterns between nature and culture and between different cultures. The examination of systems has also shown us that the suprasystems of culture create a level of complexity and reality over and above the natural world and can even destroy themselves and their own natural foundationFrom the perspective of the ISUD, this view means it is possible, natural, and necessary for academics to engage in meaningful dialogue with each other, showing how the ways they have been trained to examine “reality,” or “truth,” can be integrated. Further, professional academics should be able to talk to non-academics, to people in leadership roles, and to all human actors. Since it is a fact that individuals are parts of many larger wholes, the ISUD can nurture the process of the development of reflective self-consciousness in the formation of an international culture, an emerging suprasystem.Laszlo calls this sphere of spiritual interaction, with its physical foundation, a noosphere, his word for a “meeting of the minds.” Given our collective destruction of natural systems, it is imperative that human beings develop some version of a Systems view of reality. ISUD should work to foster this development, even though the professional training of individuals will call the process by other names, based on the labels of the past. (shrink)

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must (...) read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God. (shrink)

His Paulskirche speech on October 14, 2001, marked Habermas’s turn to public criticism of the unilateral politics of global hegemony as he promoted a globaldomestic and human rights policy. Two years later he joined ranks with Jacques Derrida against the eight “new” Europeans who lent signatures to the second Gulf War. Lest we misjudge the joint letter by Habermas and Derrida as peculiarly Eurocentric and even oblivious to the worldwide nature of the antiwar protest on February 15, 2003, we must (...) read their new alliance in the context of its emergence: Derrida and Habermas introduce a corrective that neither invokes the geographical heart of Europe nor the cosmopolitan westernization of the world. In this essay, first, I revisit the imaginary conversation between Habermas and Derrida from 1995. Second, I highlight the persisting differences in their post-2001 thinking, pairing up key political concepts that illustrate how each thinker hopes for that which is to come after the death of God. Third, I press ahead to a new critical theory that articulates postsecular hope after the death of God. (shrink)

‘Methodological cosmopolitanism’ connotes a profound transformation of the sciences as forms of public reflexive social analysis on learning to live well together through building homes in the world: what may be called the ‘Beckian vision’, in memory of Ulrich Beck. This short note considers how Beck’s concept of emancipatory catastrophism may not be the most productive development of his own programme. This is precisely brought out by a methodologically cosmopolitan analysis of a key East Asian response (...) to the global risk of climate change: innovation of low-carbon cities in China. Instead, these presumptively archetypically cosmopolitan initiatives offer something of a political education regarding the irreducibly strategic power/knowledge dynamics at work – including in ongoing contestation about the very term ‘cosmopolitan’. (shrink)

Although there is a growing acknowledgement of the potential of a more nuanced healthcare paradigm and practice, the discourses of health promotion—and with that nursing and other healthcare professionals’ practice—still tend to focus on the medical diagnosis, disease and the rationale of biomedicine. There is a need for shifting to a human practice that draws on a broader perspective related to illness. This requires a transformation of practices which can be constructed within a narrative understanding. A narrative approach appreciates the (...) importance of emotion and intersubjective relation in the telling and listening that occur in the clinical encounter. The essence of nursing lies in the creative imagination, the sensitive spirit and the intelligent understanding of the individuals’ possibilities of becoming empowered in his or her own life. This entails that the focus of the use of patients’ narratives is, ultimately, not the story itself, but the nurses’ and other healthcare professionals’ ability to support the patients in finding useful meaning in their stories. Herein, it is of particular importance to let the patients narrate about what is sparkling moments or events in the lived life. Stories with such focus can open up for patients’ hopes and dreams, which gives inspiration for finding meaningful ways to cope in life empowering personal recovery. It is, therefore, crucial to transform clinical settings into places that acknowledge the need for imagination and creativity, aiming at creating the opportunity for sensibility and vision essential to encouraging a narrative approach and thereby the ability to reflect upon and promote a healing process. (shrink)

Recently, a number of experiments have emphasized the degree to which subjects fail to detect large changes in visual scenes. This finding, referred to as “change blindness,” is often considered surprising because many people have the intuition that such changes should be easy to detect. Levin, Momen, Drivdahl, and Simons documented this intuition by showing that the majority of subjects believe they would notice changes that are actually very rarely detected. Thus subjects exhibit a metacognitive error we refer to as (...) “change blindness blindness.” Here, we test whether CBB is caused by a misestimation of the perceptual experience associated with visual changes and show that it persists even when the pre- and postchange views are separated by long delays. In addition, subjects overestimate their change detection ability both when the relevant changes are illustrated by still pictures, and when they are illustrated using videos showing the changes occurring in real time. We conclude that CBB is a robust phenomenon that cannot be accounted for by failure to understand the specific perceptual experience associated with a change. (shrink)

Opponents of cosmopolitanism often dismiss the position on the grounds that cosmopolitan proposals are completely unrealistic and that they fly in the face of our human nature. We have deep psychological needs that are satisfied by national identification and so all cosmopolitan projects are doomed, or so it is argued. In this essay we examine the psychological grounds claimed to support the importance of nationalism to our wellbeing. We argue that the alleged human needs that nationalism is said (...) to satisfy are: (i) either more complex than initially one might think or (ii) do not necessarily provide very strong grounds for the theses advocated by nationalists or (iii) can be well met in alternate ways than through national identification. Moreover, commitment to cosmopolitanism is not antithetical to meeting these needs: rather, more cosmopolitan worldviews can do quite well in meeting the needs of interest. Moreover, we argue that since nationalism is a fluid and socially constructed phenomenon, quite open to the influence of other factors, the current evidence suggests that central aspects of cosmopolitanism are quite feasible and realistic. (shrink)

How might we construe the demand that is posed by the circulation of photographic images in the contemporary world other than the sense that is given to these in contemporary cosmopolitanism, that is, as an extension of the realm of representation to a wider humanity? The ontological reading of the image and its way of marking life given here delineates an approach to the evidence that images present that de-centres the place of human subjectivity as the locus of meaning. Using (...) the work of Jean-Luc Nancy on the image, and Judith Butler on the apprehension of grievable life, the essay seeks to phrase the nature of a demand arising from the image, as that which exceeds an immediate or given context. It is this demand, I suggest, that is given in the non-representational aspect of the image, its circulation out of context. To heed this demand, I argue, is to attend to what Nancy terms “being-singular-plural” and Butler “grievable life,” and to move beyond the cosmopolitan form of vision toward what Derrida terms “hospitality.”. (shrink)

This book offers an introduction to the philosophy of Ham Sok Hon, an iconic figure in the intellectual and political history of modern Korea, and discusses the potential contribution of his ssial philosophy to cosmopolitanism.

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative (...) duty of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice. (shrink)

The article critically assesses Ulrich Beck’s body of work and its importance for contemporary sociology. It demonstrates that Beck’s elaboration of his original theory of the ‘risk society’ into a theory of the ‘world risk society’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘metamorphosis’ involved several key theoretical innovations. Firstly, Beck adjusted his notion of risk to include the threat of international terrorism in his diagnosis of the risk society. Secondly, he introduced a distinction between ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘cosmopolitization’ in order to capture (...) the specificity of contemporary social change. Thirdly and most recently, Beck outlined a theory of ‘the metamorphosis of the world’ which marks an important shift of emphasis from ‘the negative side effects of goods’ to ‘the positive side effects of bads’. In conclusion, the article identifies a number of theoretical ambiguities and unresolved questions in Beck’s theory. (shrink)

The cosmopolitan tradition begins with Diogenes, who claimed as his identity "citizen of the world." Martha Nussbaum traces the cosmopolitan ideal from ancient times to the present, weighing its limitations as well as merits. Using the capabilities approach, Nussbaum seeks to integrate the "noble but flawed" vision of world citizenship with cosmopolitanism's concern with moral and political justice for all.--.

This essay argues for the fruitfulness of Beck’s idea of cosmopolitanism for understanding the changing political, sociological and psychological attributes of climate change. This argument is illustrated through brief examinations of how climate change is contributing to the dissolution of three modern dualisms: nature-culture, present-future and global-local. Not only does the cosmopolitan perspective help to understand the ways in which science and society are mutually constructing the phenomenon of climate change, it also offers us a way of asking (...) ‘what can climate change do for us?’ rather than ‘what can we do for climate change?’ Sociologists are needed for answering this question. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to evaluate the ethical and political conclusions that Ulrich Beck draws from his account of ‘civilization risks’. I have argued that the categories of ‘life’, ‘the organic’, and the ‘technological’ which are presented in Risk Society, presuppose a certain metaphysics of ‘natural’ human identity; and that it is the inscription of this identity in the politics of risk administration which opens the possibility of an absolutely legitimized regulation of nature, humanity, and society. Thus, (...) in order to evaluate the ‘risk’ entailed in the ethical and political strictures of Beck's ‘world risk society’, I have had recourse to the expositions of time, presence, identity and technology which Derrida has given in Of Grammatology and Specters of Marx. It is through these expositions that I have tried to work through the idea of an ecological politics that would remain sensitive to the events of difference and alterity precipitated by its own ‘cosmopolitan’ interventions. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck asserts that global risks, such as climate change, generate a form of ‘compulsory cosmopolitanism’, which ‘glues’ various actors into collective action. Through an analysis of emerging ‘cosmopolitan risk communities’ in Chinese climate governance, this article points out a ‘blind spot’ in the theorization of cosmopolitan belonging and an associated inadequacy in explaining shifting power relations. The article addresses this problem by engaging with the intersectionality of the cosmopolitan space. It is argued that cosmopolitan (...) belonging is a form of performative identity. Its key characteristic lies in a ‘liberating prerogative’, which enables individuals to participate in the solution of common problems creatively. It is this liberating prerogative that forces the state from a position of political monopoly and marks the cosmopolitan moment. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck’s quest to unshackle the social sciences from their methodological nationalism has yielded numerous influential concepts. In his last work he theorized the transformation of a globally connected world through the notion of ‘metamorphosis’ understood as a form of radical change. This transfiguration is driven by different perceptions of catastrophism, carrying the potential to re-shape world risk society. In this essay I critically assess what Beck refers to as ‘emancipatory catastrophism’. I suggest substituting emancipatory with cosmopolitan (...) catastrophism. Cosmopolitan catastrophism seeks to adjoin an event-centered approach with a relational understanding of world risk society. By emphasizing cosmopolitan trajectories we avoid the linear fallacies plaguing earlier theories of modernity. Beck’s iterative approach provides us with a heuristic tool, which addresses the ongoing interplay of universal scripts and local appropriations in the context of contingencies and uncertainties. Previously seen as residual, catastrophism becomes the center of our analytic efforts. (shrink)

In Cosmopolitan Theology, author Namsoon Kang proposes a theology that embraces and at the same time moves beyond collective identity position and group-based allegiances. It crosses borders of gender, race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Kang offers a vision of a global community of radical inclusion, solidarity, and deep compassion and justice for others. Blending theology with philosophy, she crosses borders of academism and activism, and the discursive borders of modernism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism. Cosmopolitan Theology (...) sheds a new light both in academia and the community of Christian believers by providing a public relevance of Jesus' teaching of neighbor-love, hospitality, and solidarity in our world today. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Acknowledgments References.

This paper seeks to rehabilitate the work of the Italian priest and social theorist Luigi Sturzo in regard to two areas of current concern: first, the interdependence of nation-states and the emergence of the international community; and, second, the notion of human personality as ground for these developments. In this latter regard, the paper draws on the work of the sociologist Christian Smith to show how an account of the person that transcends empiricist positivism can shed light on authentic human (...) development. Finally, the paper correlates this moral vision espoused by Sturzo and Smith with the work of some contemporary cosmopolitan democrats. (shrink)

This introduction briefly describes the relational trajectory between Ulrich Beck and Asia in the last few years. It draws particular attention to his last words about the role of Asia in the global risk community. Beck began to speak of the concept of metamorphosis in the 2014 Seoul conference as the correct key to understanding emancipatory catastrophism that he had expressed in the 2013 Potsdam conference. He was fascinated by the explanatory power of this concept and was driven (...) to complete a book to explain the cosmopolitan change of the world from this perspective. With his advocacy of cities as cosmopolitan transformers, he urged Asian cities, particularly Seoul, to initiate ‘United Cities of Asia’ for a cosmopolitan cooperation for risk governance. Beck also suggested ‘a parliament of risk actors’ as a practical task to be realized in the future. In this introduction the author attempts to trace back the formation of these ideas by focusing on the interaction between Beck and Asia before his sudden passing. (shrink)

In popular imagery, the littorals of Sulu and Zamboanga conjure visions of pirates, terrorists, and bandits marauding its rough seas, open shores, and rugged mountains. These bleak accounts render the region nothing but a violent and peripheral southern Philippine backdoor inconspicuous to the sophisticated constituencies of the world’s metropolitan centres. Obscured from these imageries are the lasting cosmopolitan traits of openness, flexibility, and reception of local folk to trans-local cultural streams that marked Sulu and Zamboanga as a globalised space (...) across the ages and oceans. The distinctive features of these cosmopolitan sensibilities are strikingly discernible in inter-generationally shared narratives, artefacts, and performances that were continually renewed from the days when Sulu and Zamboanga served as a borderless trading and cultural enclave nestled at the crossroads of the Pacific and the Indian Oceans. These enduring cosmopolitan sensibilities are embodied in the blending, among others, of the time-honoured dance of pangalay and the pop-musical dance genre celebrated on actual, analogue, and digitally-mediated spaces of the contemporary world. Furthermore, these embodied sensibilities are evident in song compositions that proclaim the humanistic themes of hope, peace, and prosperity to their place and the world in ways that exemplify the local people’s broader sense of connections beyond the narrow association of family, community, ethnicity, religion, and identity. This mixed bag of age-old and recent imaginaries and cultural traffic evoke a sociality that link the social spaces of the troubled but once and current globalised region to continuing acts of transcendence in history, memory, and visions of the future. In these marginalized places, we can see an unyielding tradition of cultural re-adaptation and creativity made up of myriad everyday acts that are down-to-earth, pragmatic, interstitial, and practical cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

This serves as an introduction to this section on Beck and as a standalone essay. In it we see that the writers in this section understand Beck's risk as modernity itself. And in this context risk's reflexive modernity is understood as ‘indeterminate modernity’. The essay thematizes a radically subjectivist reading of Beck's risk. It sees reflexivity as opposed to the objectivism and positivism of Kant's critique of pure reason, and instead in terms of the subjectivity of Kant's (...) third aesthetic critique. Thus, Beck's subjectivist risk and indeterminate modernity focuses not on Kantian and positivist first-modernity ‘cause’ but instead on second and indeterminate-modernity ‘consequence’. This entails significant levels of anxiety on the part of individuals as well as the possibility of enhanced happiness. The latter is understood in terms of, again, the subjectivist psychology of Daniel Kahneman's behaviouralist economics. This is a substantivist economics and dovetails with Weber's Methodenstreit between the substantivism of the Historical School and the formalism of neoclassical economics. The essay closes with a look at how this radically subjectivist and substantivist reflexivity is the basis for a panoply of non-normative institutions in Beck's vision of global cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

ExcerptCosmopolitan world society is a successful and widely shared political project. It is shared by decision makers pursuing liberal agendas of democratization and prosperity while prosecuting criminal and terrorist deviance. It is also shared by leading social thinkers, such as Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, Francis Fukuyama, David Held, and Niklas Luhmann. Even the proverbial “man on the street” shares the vision of cosmopolitan world society when (s)he refuses to interpret deviance from “universal” values in any terms other (...) than greed or insanity. Overall, the liberal vision of cosmopolitan world society runs somewhat like this. Globalization and global governance lead from…. (shrink)

This paper offers two possible readings of the Earth Charter that are informed by current scholarship in the field of environmental politics. The first reading finds much in the document to suggest congruence with emerging discourses of cosmopolitanism and global environmental citizenship. The second reading, a more sceptical one, identifies aspects of the Earth Charter that seem more resonant with depoliticizing United Nations-style light green globalism than with an inclusive ethical vision of environmentalism. After setting out these two readings, (...) I argue that, although potentially undermining of its endorsability, thinking critically about problematic aspects of the Earth Charter is an exercise that may point in the direction of a cosmopolitan environmentalism that is less banal and instrumental and more dialogically open, reflexive, and democratic. (shrink)

This article proposes that, in line with moral-cosmopolitan theorists, affluent nations have an obligation, founded in justice and not merely altruism or beneficence, to share the responsibility of the burden of public health implementation in low-income contexts. The current Ebola epidemic highlights the fact that countries with under-developed health systems and limited resources cannot cope with a significant and sudden health threat. The link between burden of disease, adverse factors in the social environment and poverty is well established and (...) confirmed by the 2008 World Health Organization (WHO)’s Social Determinants of Health Commission report. Well-resourced nations generally consider that they have some humanitarian obligation to assist where possible, but this obligation is limited. The following questions are considered: Is reliance on the principle of beneficence to address the global disparities in the social determinants of health and life expectancy at birth good enough? Do well-resourced nations have some obligation from justice, which is stronger than from beneficence, and which cannot be as easily cast aside or diminished, to address these issues? In a globalised world, shaped by centuries of historical injustice and where first-world economies are now so intertwined and reliant on third-world labour, beneficence is not a strong enough principle on which to base an obligation to achieve the WHO vision of ‘health equity through action on the social determinants of health’. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitan sociology affords a much-needed rethinking of the transnational politics of climate change, not least in pointing to an emerging inter-urban geography of world cities as a potential new source of community, change and solidarity. This short essay, written in honour of Beck’s forward-looking agenda for a post-Euro-centric social science, outlines the contours of such an urban-cosmopolitan ‘realpolitik’ of climate risks, as this is presently unfolding across East Asian world cities. Much more than a (...) theory-building endeavour, the essay suggests, Beck’s sociology provides a standing invitation for further transnational dialogue and collaborative empirical work, in East Asia and beyond, on what are, arguably, the defining challenges for the 21st century world of global risks. (shrink)

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative (...) duty of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice. (shrink)

This dissertation explores a family of theoretical models of humanitarian military intervention. A number of recent theorists, including Tesón, Caney, Buchanan, Orend, Moellendorf, and Wheeler, build their models from a perspective called ‘cosmopolitanism.’ They offer arguments based on the moral supremacy of human rights, the arbitrary character of territorial boundaries, and the duty to protect individual human beings exposed to serious and systematic violence by their own governments. I develop a model of intervention that recognizes the moral significance of political (...) self-government. To the extent that international society should countenance a ‘duty to protect’ human rights, the duty ought to be constrained by a commitment to the values of self-government. The model developed in this dissertation also recognizes the significance of international law enforcement. Insofar as we should permit a role of enforcement for international human rights, that role should be constrained by formally accepted global principles and in particular by positive obligations to prevent and punish actions regarded as international crimes. These other global values are viewed with suspicion by cosmopolitan theorists, who tend to construe them in stark contrast to the vision of global responsibility for human rights protection. But I will show how these other values emerged simultaneously with cosmopolitanism and share many of its underlying intuitions. Because self-government and law enforcement are linked politically to the cosmopolitan vision, these two distinctive global values can be utilized as tools to fortify or expand cosmopolitanism by enlarging the global sense of responsibility for human rights. The aim of this project is to explain how these other values came to be neglected by cosmopolitan theorists, and why they should not be forgotten. (shrink)