Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Focusing on the examples of Liberia, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Zaire, this text demonstrates how African rulers hold on to power while severed from foreign aid and subjected to collapsing economies and disappearing bureaucracies.

Warlord Politics and African States

The public sphere is the space of communication of ideas and projects that emerge from society and are addressed to the decision makers in the institutions of society. The global civil society is the organized expression of the values and interests of society. The relationships between government and civil society and their interaction via the public sphere define the polity of society. The process of globalization has shifted the debate from the national domain to the global debate, prompting the emergence of a global civil society and of ad hoc forms of global governance. Accordingly, the public sphere as the space of debate on public affairs has also shifted from the national to the global and is increasingly constructed around global communication networks. Public diplomacy, as the diplomacy of the public, not of the government, intervenes in this global public sphere, laying the ground for traditional forms of diplomacy to act beyond the strict negotiation of power relationships by building on shared...

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The New Public Sphere: Global Civil Society, Communication Networks, and Global Governance

Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, both comparative politics professors at Harvard University, have written a valuable, high-profile book that provides several useful insights into the current sta...

How Democracies Die

Land grabbing has emerged as a significant issue in contemporary global governance that cuts across the fields of development, investment, food security, among others. Whereas land grabbing per se is not a new phenomenon, having historical precedents in the era of imperialism, the character, scale, pace, orientation, and key drivers of the recent wave of land grabs is a distinct historical phenomenon closely tied to major shifts in power and production in the global political economy. Land grabbing is facilitated by ever greater flows of capital, goods, and ideas across borders, and these flows occur through axes of power that are far more polycentric than the North–South imperialist tradition. In this introduction we argue that land grabbing speaks to many of the core questions of globalization studies. However, we note scholars of globalization have yet to deeply engage with this new field. We situate land grabbing in an era of advanced capitalism, multiple global crises, and the role of new configurati...

/pdf/land-grabbing-and-global-governance-critical-perspectives-3n2z3z2cuv.pdf

Pablo Policzer

Papers

Weakness by design: neoliberal governance over mining and water in Chile