Liberal Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

The surreal and the real: T’ien Hsia (1935–41) and 1930s Shanghai

This article explores how the Shanghai-based general interest magazine T’ien Hsia (1935–41) engaged with European surrealist movements in the 1930s. The first part of the article explores how the magazine’s literature and artwork responded to surrealist tendencies and ideas and argues that the prevalence of these tendencies and ideas intensified from 1937 in response to the Second Sino-Japanese War and the resultant Japanese colonization of Shanghai. Whilst surrealism offered a vehicle for a variety of responses to warfare – such as escapism, political comment, and black humour – it was also a movement through which the magazine’s transnational editorial team, including Wen Yuanning, a charismatic young writer-diplomat who had graduated from Cambridge, John C. Wu, and the American-born journalist Emily Hahn, could assert their distinct brand of liberal cosmopolitanism. The second part of the article explores how terms like ‘cosmopolitanism’, together with other postcolonial theory-related concepts such as ‘hybridity’ or ‘decoloniality’, help to illustrate the magazine’s turn towards the surreal as symptomatic of both its publication in Shanghai, a semicolonial treaty port that brought together a myriad of national identities and artistic styles, and also of its editors’ aims to provide a sense of cohesiveness and collaboration that transcended national boundaries.

Enlightened Tribalism

Tribalism is often derided as a morally primitive form of human organization. But for most of human history, people organized themselves into tribes that facilitated collective action and provided their members with a sense of security and identity. In stark contrast, liberal cosmopolitans have promoted the ideal of the world community. They tend to diminish the moral importance of tribal attachments and instead claim that altruism should have a more universal scope. We argue that although tribalism can encourage needless conflict, it can also provide meaning, promote important virtues, and increase the long-run viability of human groups better than liberal cosmopolitanism. We call the view that we endorse “enlightened tribalism.” We end by identifying some of the problems tribalism can create, and distinguishing the kind of tribalism that leads groups of people to flourish from the kinds that lead to unnecessary suffering or self-destruction.

A Decade of Liberal Cosmopolitanism in the United States: The Effects of Gender, Race, and Income

This study investigates correlates of cosmopolitan sentiments in the United States over a decade, contributing to the literature in two ways. First, it tests the “group status thesis” in the U.S., which suggests that marginalized and disadvantaged groups are more likely to exhibit cosmopolitan attitudes. Second, it examines the interaction between socioeconomic factors and the waves of the World Values Survey conducted between 2006 and 2017. The findings support the main hypotheses of the group status thesis: women, non-Whites, and lower-income individuals tend to be more cosmopolitan in their outlook. Over the 11-year period, the gap in liberal cosmopolitanism between genders and income levels widened. The study concludes that liberal cosmopolitanism is rooted in specific structural locations, with marginalized groups being more inclined to embrace it. Notably, support for cosmopolitanism remained relatively strong before and during the early years of the Trump administration in 2017.

Revisiting the Rorty–Lyotard debate: The microchip and liberal cosmopolitanism

In the mid-1980s, Richard Rorty debated aspects of Jean-François Lyotard’s evolving theories of language and politics, embracing the latter’s critique of metanarratives as forms of metaphysics we should discard but rejecting Lyotard’s claims about the incommensurability of language games. Largely overlooked was the force of Lyotard’s critique of the transvaluation of knowledge in the emerging digital age, canvased in The Postmodern Condition. This article revisits the encounter between these thinkers to reconstruct the more central challenge that Lyotard’s theory posed to Rorty’s pragmatic politics and to liberal cosmopolitanism more broadly. Lyotard’s work was prescient in detailing an emerging technological order in which ideals of tolerance and solidarity in the form of Rortian translation and redescription come into conflict with imperatives of performativity, profit-seeking, and power – fostering dominance rather than universal progress. The article concludes by drawing implications of the encounter for current scholarship on Rorty and political theory.

“Home” as a Theological Problem for Politics: Weil, Arendt, and the Common Desire for the Common

ABSTRACTThis article engages the global displacement crisis by rendering the concept of ‘home’ as a theological problem for politics, linking contemporary geopolitical conflict to broader issues of forced migration. For help, we engage Simone Weil's theopolitical critique of domination‐based political organising, Hannah Arendt's insights into the texture of political space and belonging, and Jodi Dean's concept of a ‘collective desire for collectivity’ to propose a lateral, connective politics of home that secures local communities while also fostering global connection. Our constructive theological proposal is that the power of love for home entails the embrace of neighbour (near and far) that moves beyond the usual options of liberal cosmopolitanism, communitarian localism, and the Realpolitik of geopolitical alliances. By reconsidering and intensifying the Christian concept of neighbour‐love and linking it to the common reality of displacement and the common longing for home, we take the first steps towards illuming and unveiling a political theology of home that is neither preferential nor naively inclusive.

Response: Commentary: Debating secularism: a liberal cosmopolitan perspective

Response: Commentary: Debating secularism: a liberal cosmopolitan perspective

Commentary: Debating secularism: a liberal cosmopolitan perspective.

Commentary: Debating secularism: a liberal cosmopolitan perspective.

GOVERNING THE WARS; THEORY, LEGISLATION, HUMAN RIGHTS, HUMAN SECURITY, AND ETHICS

The study indicates wartime programmed violence's implications within the liberal interpretation of contemporary legislative and human rights debates. It discusses related war theories and practices, problematizing instrumentalization of instilling new global ethics, arguing that humanitarian interventions often became "usable" in the new millennium's geopolitics; wars fatally affect the innocent. It points out that the origins of democracy are structurally violent and that the threat of terrorism, in addition to revealing new forms of "democratic violence," is having a transformative effect on the very character of democracy. How the concept of just cause agrees with armed humanitarian intervention, and whether we have the right to impose democracy by force? Whether the theory of just war in its positivist-legalist paradigm that combines universalist principles with utilitarian harm-weighing versus profit can offer a comprehensive method of morally contemplating current wars. The distinction between liberal cosmopolitan arguments and social democratic ones is apparent. The arbitrariness and the imposition of individual states' views create issues, leading to fragility (human security, socioeconomics, economic development, health). The compulsory international focus and responsibility should incorporate critical medical (children) - "the right to health" and humanitarian goods. Implementing rules to control war's destructiveness is less effective in intercultural conflicts. The doctrine of "just war" application is questionable, and no new victim should suffer even when the goal of the intervention is entirely legitimate and "humane." It cannot be just that it will exempt intervention forces from applying international humanitarian law, nor does the legitimacy of the intervention exempt them from respect for international humanitarian law. The international law concept has evolved from an instrument of promoting peace to an agent of the violent argument of force realization. Ethics is often imposed as politics; human rights ethics transformed into war ethics, leading to human rights violations and civilian casualties. War justice and the moral paradigm within globalization's contemporary forms are questioned. A broader discussion of the assumptions of the universality of Western values that have driven international law for centuries is required.

Exclusion, empathy, and Islam: The Runaways in the literary marketplace

ABSTRACT With the location of the global literary marketplace in western centres, post-9/11 interest in anglophone Pakistani literature comes with the fetishization of minoritized identities. Fatima Bhutto’s The Runaways combats Islamophobic arguments about the Islamic origins of radicalization, showing that it emerges out of exclusion stemming from material facts of race, class, and gender. However, the novel's place in the literary marketplace complicates Bhutto's efforts to elicit empathy from readers. This article argues that although The Runaways is ideologically opposed to Eurocentric cosmopolitan liberalism, it occasionally falters in its representation of Pakistan and Islamic practices. The novel’s empathy is invested in universalism, suggesting a blind spot which is attributable to the global literary marketplace’s anticipation of a secular cosmopolitan “elite” readership. Through analysis of Bhutto’s novel, this article explores the possibility of productive empathy, and interrogates the ethics of reading and writing the other.

Debating secularism: A liberal cosmopolitan perspective.

In the classical notion of secularism, privatization of religion is an essential component of freedom and equality between citizens, so that rights are granted to individuals rather than to communities. The currently dominant objections to this notion in the literature are the multiculturalist thesis, primarily expounded by Tariq Modood, and the critique of secularism through the "genealogical" method, associated with Talal Asad and his followers. This article critically assesses these objections and defends the classical notion of secularism from a liberal cosmopolitan perspective. The argument that the classical notion perfectly addresses the questions of freedom of conscience and diversity of belief is further supported by reference to an ignored source, Thomas More's Utopia.

Gandhi’s Compassionate Cosmopolitan Ethics and Global Poverty

In the post-Rawlsian world many liberal cosmopolitan philosopher and theorists have been trying to argue that love, emotion, sentiments and empathy are needed to ensure justice in this broken world. Some of them like Martha Nussbaum, Graham Long etc. have attempted to theorise on Emotion and sentiments within cosmopolitan traditions. I argue that empathy, love and sentiments are European ideas and sometimes become problematic for the reason that they do not get out of the problems of “binaries”----primarily the binary of the self and others. In my view, liberal cosmopolitans have failed to understand the ontological and metaphysical significance of the non-duality which was central to the Gandhi’s understanding of cosmopolitanism. In Gandhi’s theory of cosmology there is no difference between the self and other, they are not placed in tension with each other rather they complement each other and are essentially interdependent. This article humbly attempts to explore the possibilities of an alternative conception of cosmopolitanism based on universal morality through Gandhi’s idea of non-violence and compassion. It probes into the possibility of universal morality of Ahimsa (non- violence) and Karuna (compassion) and argues that it is not plausible to think of it without any metaphysical supposition that we all have the same Atman. It also examines and criticizes the Western notion of cosmopolitan morality based on human fellowship without any metaphysical principle. Unlike moral cosmopolitanism, compassionate cosmopolitanism does not focus primarily on the duty rather it goes deeply into understanding the human nature and virtue--what kind of person we are and how we feel about other fellow human? It enquires into the kind of emotional attachment exists or required between fellow humans.

Dialling Down Hatred: An Online Pilot Project to Test Counter-Narrative Effectiveness Among Far-Right Sympathetic Audiences in the UK

Over the past eight years, traditionalist communitarian versus more liberal cosmopolitan value divides have opened and caused considerable polarization in the UK. Cleaving to Pro-Leave and Pro-Remain positions on the EU referendum question (and though posited to have waned slightly now Brexit is settled), this new identity politics has had the lasting effect of emboldening and mainstreaming radical right-wing tenets (namely, anti-migrant, anti-Islam and anti-multicultural) that were once fringe. Despite this renewed challenge and imperative from far-right extremist organizations and their concomitant attempts at inserting their viewpoints into the UK political mainstream, there is a dearth of empirical data on what works and what does not to alleviate this divide. Indeed, most evaluations on this topic tend to privilege either an ideologically agnostic approach (i.e. treating specific extremisms as functionally equivalent or co-equal), or one specifically tailored to Islamist extremism. Moreover, approaches tend to privilege individuals who have already moved a fair way down the conveyor belt of extremism, showing either commitment to a specific extremist ideology or group of organized extremist actors. This article aims to provide a useful counterpoint to these prevailing tendencies. Taking the UK as a case study, it lays out how an iterative, experimental research methodology – mixing focus groups and surveys - can be used to test counter-messaging content and, most importantly, evaluate impactful attitudinal change among far-right sympathetic audiences. It is based on over 12 months of research among far-right sympathetic users on Facebook – with an initial round of focus group testing in September 2020 followed by larger-scale online testing on the Facebook platform from February-September 2021, and involved a collaboration between CARR, ACS, M&C Saatchi, the Outsiders & Facebook, with over 36 focus group participants and a combined online experimental reach of over 1 million Facebook users.

Reinforcing or Undermining Divisions between ‘Ordinary People’ and an ‘Educated Liberal Cosmopolitan Elite?’

Reinforcing or Undermining Divisions between ‘Ordinary People’ and an ‘Educated Liberal Cosmopolitan Elite?’

Necropolítica y catábasis migratoria: una respuesta cosmopolita a los recorridos por el inframundo global en <i>Señales que precederán al fin del mundo</i> de Yuri Herrera

Signs Preceding the End of the World by the Mexican writer Yuri Herrera examines the emergence of a liberal cosmopolitan subjectivity based on the revision of Nahuatl katabasis. Herrera uses this mythologem to symbolize the persistence of violence and colonial inequities exerted, as a historical continuum, on the fragile migrant body. In this journey through the necropolitics of territorial, cultural and identity borders, the importance of intercultural mediation is highlighted as a mechanism of ethical repair of rituals and memories and, therefore, following Kwame A. Appiah, of practices of writing and reading of global stage.

Moving archives, touch, and world literary melancholy in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian

ABSTRACT Through a reading of Han Kang’s 2007 novel The Vegetarian, this article critiques two prevailing approaches to world literature and the politics of memory: a liberal cosmopolitan celebration of cross-cultural legibility and a postcolonial politics of “melancholic” resistance to globalization. It argues that both employ an opposition between legibility and illegibility, either celebrating world literature for its potential to make unfamiliar histories accessible, or for its ability to disrupt a globalized present through illegible fragments of past trauma. Illustrating how this opposition also animates debates around memory politics in postcolonial South Korea, the article suggests this oppositional approach to the past emerges from the histories and ideological logics of colonial modernity and remains normative across varied contexts. In contrast, The Vegetarian evokes new possibilities for world literary “resistance”, reimagining it as a form of material-discursive friction which transforms normative structures through encounters in the present.

The Rise of Islamic Liberalism: A Qualitative Study

The contemporary world order from public to private, academic to politics and society is largely based on liberal values and ideals. This global hegemony of the liberal order has also become a catalyst for the liberalization of Islam. This article details the emerging trends of Liberal Islam in Muslim societies and focuses on the post 9/11 period. The wave of fundamentalism has not only caused a strange response among the modernized classes of the Muslim population, but also among traditionalists and the fundamentalists. This response is the emergence of a cosmopolitan liberalism in Muslim societies. In this article, various aspects and factors of Islamic liberalism will be discussed. The process of liberalization in the traditional circles of Pakistan and the liberalization of the Islamist political organizations are discussed as representative cases. The article would be concluded by suggesting the future of liberal Islam, the challenges it faces and how it will dominate the major interpreted versions of Islam.  

STOP WARS

STOP WARS

Sheltering Populists? House Prices and the Support for Populist Parties

Populist parties, particularly from the right of the political spectrum, have sharply increased their electoral support in recent years, creating great media and scholarly interest. In this article we suggest that the housing market may have been important in defining who switched to populist voting and where they were located. We build on existing work that connects house prices to “first-dimension politics” of redistribution and classic left-right political identification to argue that house prices might also shape preferences on the “second dimension” of politics: support for populist nationalism versus liberal cosmopolitanism. Using both novel precinct- and individual-level data from Denmark, we show that negative shocks to house prices over the election cycle are strongly associated with shifts to support for the Danish People’s Party, a pattern that has amplified over recent elections. We then turn to corroborate this relationship using local housing data in Sweden, Norway, and Finland.

False friends: Leftist nationalism and the project of transnational solidarity

A growing number of left-wing scholars criticize practices of transnational solidarity. Pointing to the cooptation of “globalism” by neoliberal capitalism, these scholars utilize this critique to advance leftwing nationalism. In this article, I reconstruct symptomatic texts of this genre and identify the critique of (liberal) cosmopolitanism as the common denominator in their calls for nationalizing the Left. As a consequence of their opposition to cosmopolitanism, these authors reject freedom of movement or global justice activism. In order to examine whether the project of transnational solidarity is affected by this critique, I reconstruct its justifications in Critical Theory and postcolonial-feminist theory. Hauke Brunkhorst and Chandra Mohanty exemplarily theorize transnational solidarity in different ways, but each based on a substantial critique of liberal cosmopolitanism. By that, I show that a principled return to nationalism derived from a critique of cosmopolitanism is informed by coincidental evidence that rejects practices of transnational solidarity because of their alleged embeddedness in cosmopolitan reason. Drawing on La Via Campesina, I illustrate principles of a transnational solidarity project that is not justified with liberal cosmopolitan ideas. Their experiences challenge the nationalist/statist critique while not falling back into naïve and/or neoliberal cosmopolitanism.

Illiberal Nationalism and the Backlash against Liberal Cosmopolitanism in Post-Communist Europe

This article analyses the fate of liberal nationalism in the post-communist space and the rise of illiberal variants in recent years. It explores how liberalism has been decoupled from nationalism and is now closely associated with cosmopolitanism, which supports universal rights while downplaying notions of national citizenship. The result is that, as publics have grown sour on globalization and institutions such as the European Union, illiberal nationalism has become the “default” nationalist response. While recognizing that this reaction holds across much of Europe, it investigates the rise of illiberal nationalism in Hungary and Poland. In addition to analyzing actions and statements of political elites, it presents public opinion data to argue that there remains a pronounced East-West gap on several fundamental issues.