Global Cosmopolitanism Research Articles

LEGAL SCHOLACTIVISTS IN THE THIRD WORLD: BETWEEN AMBITION, ALTRUISM AND ACCESS

This article argues that legal agents from the Third World play an important role in facilitating and advancing subaltern claims by operating as “scholactivists”. The mediums they use for such advances necessarily require leveraging of the international legal discourse and various international forums. However, their success is constrained by the dynamics of the international legal field and the ability to assimilate within a global cosmopolitan class. Legal scholactivists are examined here from a place-based perspective, locating their praxis in the geographical Third World. In so doing, this article traces the life and work of Dr. Kamal Hossain, a celebrated Bangladeshi lawyer with many accolades at home and abroad. In his long and illustrious career, Hossain has voiced subaltern and Third World concerns on the global stage through a variety of mediums including domestic and international legal practice, advocacy, international organizations and various non-profit, non-governmental and civil society organizational efforts. Although the references to Bangladesh may be very specific and are used as an illustration, it is hoped that the claims made in this paper will be generalizable and applicable to similarly situated countries.

Adaptation of Contract Models of Oil and Gas : A Comparative Study

Differences in law systems, constitution, legislation, and regimes in oil and gas business across the world enforce to have a comparative study by extending laws in oil and gas. It is, from global perspective, implemented a constant demand to the law to take essentialization categories as its base. Nature required universalism, an analysis of valid and constant law sifted toward cosmopolitan law. Manifestation of globalization was transformed and corresponded to natural regulations in adapting a contract model. Oil and gas and its exploring development within global law systems included Civil Law, Common Law, Socialist Law, Scandinavia Law, and Islamic Law. Important discoveries in oil and gas sector, therefore, might have changes by universally global cosmopolitan law.

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

Mix En Meng It Op: Emile YX?'s Alternative Race and Language Politics in South African Hip-Hop

MENCIPTAKAN GENERASI YANG BERWAWASAN GLOBAL BERKARAKTER LOKAL MELALUI HARMONISASI NILAI KOSMOPOLITAN DAN NASIONALISME DALAM PEMBELAJARAN PKN

This article is the result of a study on the harmonization of cosmopolitan values and nationalism in teaching civics as well as how these two ideas could create educational output that has global knowledge but do not forget a good personality or character that has been planted since the beginning. The study was motivated by the severe problems of the national consciousness (national consciousness) young people today who need serious revamping. In the era of globalization, the Indonesian people are faced with two major forces that are in tandem with globalization cosmopolitanism and nationalism with a marked weakening of the emergence of ideas of regionalism, broad autonomy, separatism and racial conflicts. Based on this, the study of how the process of harmonization of cosmopolitan values and nationalism in teaching civics and how the ideas can be a way for the creation of a sound education global output but remain local in character. Despite the fact that conceptually there is a contradiction between the cosmopolitan values of nationalism, both are at the poles of attraction, where the value of cosmopolitan pulled into the global sphere, while the value of nationalism pulled into the exclusive domain. In such a situation Civics learning is expected to be a bridge to harmonize both values. Value cosmopolitan and nationalism became the crucial factor in developing a global perspective but does not eliminate local character when done through learning Civics quality, quality and meaningful.

A cosmopolitan return to nature: how combining aesthetization and moralization processes expresses distinction in food consumption

ABSTRACTThis article investigates how foodies' adoption of New Nordic Food enables them to combine aesthetic and moral cosmopolitanism ideals. It demonstrates that consumers integrate aesthetic and moral cosmopolitan discourses through two complementary processes: the re-aesthetization of nature and the re-moralization of the exotic. These processes combine in a cosmopolitan interest for one of the last unexplored foreign contexts: nature. The findings of this article contribute to existing research by showing that moral cosmopolitanism reflects a more individualized and less engaged form of consumption than ethical consumption. They illustrate how urban consumers perform distinction in contexts where nature is the most exotic unexplored context, highlighting further the reterritorialization of global cosmopolitan consumption, where food trends can only be consumed authentically in their context of origin. Finally, this article shows how moral cosmopolitanism can support consumers who acknowledge the need for ethical consumption yet struggle with its adoption.

Global Protests and Cosmopolitan Publicity: Challenging the Representative Claims of Nation-States

In the past decade, a global wave of protests has spread to both liberal democratic and authoritarian countries in which the representative claims of nation-states have been profoundly challenged. This article explores the extent to which these protest movements reflect cosmopolitan practices and possibilities. The central argument is that the protests created forms of ‘cosmopolitan publicity’ in which people engaged in transnationally connected social criticism and political contestation directed at rupturing the representative authority of their state. The article first provides an account of cosmopolitan publicity, arguing that it is produced by interaction across territorial and cultural borders in which open and egalitarian publics are formed to deal with shared problems. It then argues that varying degrees of cosmopolitan publicity were generated in the recent global protests by examining the transnational communication, tactics, and claims of the Arab Spring and Occupy social movements. Finally, the article argues that these protests are indicative of ongoing crises of representation that plague many nation-states and create opportunities for new forms of cosmopolitan politics.

Between regional community and global society: Europe in the shadow of Schmitt and Kojève

While celebrated for bringing peace and prosperity to the region, European integration has been recently challenged by various internal and external crises that call the progressivist narrative of ever closer—and larger—union into question. Torn between regional community and global society, particularism and cosmopolitanism, and politics and technocracy, the European Union appears beset by fundamental tensions. In search of a different theoretical perspective on “the crisis,” some commentators have drawn on Carl Schmitt’s political theory to emphasize key issues concerning political decisions, identities, and boundaries in Europe. Yet, Schmitt comes with his own blind spots. For the purpose of a critical engagement with Schmitt’s potential insights and their limits, this article contrasts his approach with that of his contemporary Alexandre Kojève, who envisioned the integration of world society through economy, law, technology, and administration, a perspective not unfamiliar to the original story of European integration. In reconsidering the dialectic between Schmitt’s and Kojève’s positions, this article goes beyond their apparent contradictions and discusses attempts by both authors to reconcile the opposition, from Kojève’s move to Empires to Schmitt’s theory of the union, thereby illuminating deep-seated dilemmas of contemporary European politics which fundamentally condition its trajectory between contestation and re-constitution.

Between safety and vulnerability: the exiled other of international relations

Inspired by the idea of safe citizenship this article queries the possibilities of safety in an age of securitization. It challenges the cosmopolitan worldview and its iteration of a global cosmopolitan citizen. It champions an account of affective citizenship, narration and attends to the trauma of exile. It offers an account of exile before suggesting an institutional design premised on politicization. This design, it is argued, facilitates moments of storytelling fostering individual empowerment. This unorthodox rendering of agency allows the traumatized exile to negotiate the world as it is, not as it could be, as a potential ‘safe’ citizen.

Business Ethics Education and Global Age Cosmopolitanism (gac)

This article will propose a form of critical business ethics education that will generate Global Age Cosmopolitanism (gac), which is aimed mostly at the propagation of economic justice. Because business practices have the propensity to generate both positive and negative outcomes, a careful review of the social compromises that may underliegacis necessary. It is important to assert that, “thegacethic is a cosmopolitan perspective that presupposes civic universalism” (Rivera 2012). I will identify the key components of the proposed critical business ethics education and will indicate how these differ from standard business ethics education. I will also demonstrate how the proposed form of business ethics education is tied togac.It is the purpose of this article to consider how business ethics educators and curricula should incorporate proactive approaches to economic justice and strive to avoid the reactive nature of past business ethics literature, the primary goal of which has been to repair unethical business behavior.

Global cities, cosmopolitanism, and geographies of tolerance

Scholarly attention devoted to global cities has emphasized their economic and political significance. Yet global cities are also deeply cultural and ideological in nature. Contrary to a long tradition of urban studies that views urban life as inherently alienating, this essay argues that the social and cultural diversity of global cities renders them mechanisms for the generation of tolerance and empathy. It opens with a brief review of global cities. Second, it traces the contours of cosmopolitanism as an ideology that fosters respect for social and cultural differences and a wider community of caring. Third, it reviews the empirical evidence of American global cities to make the case that their diversity leads them to generate a progressive cosmopolitan ethnics. It draws on the literature of social psychology, the work of Richard Florida, and indices of immigration, religious and linguistic diversity, homophobia, and voting patterns to substantiate the claim that cosmopolitan values are most evident and deeply rooted in globalized metropolitan centers.

The Particularist Pursuit of American Universalism: The American Jewish Committee’s 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights’

This article recovers a forgotten episode in the history of human rights: the 1944 ‘Declaration on Human Rights' sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. With an unprecedented media campaign and endorsements from ‘1300 distinguished Americans of all faiths,' the 1944 ‘Declaration' at first glance appears to be a prime example of wartime pluralist consensus and liberal internationalism in the USA. Yet as a closer examination of the document’s genesis and reception reveal, the document actually generated a striking array of polar-opposite reactions, including support from conservative isolationists, criticism from civil libertarians, and sharply split reactions from fellow Jewish groups and Catholic organizations. In recapturing this story of political conflict and ideological confusion, I propose to disentangle the stories of liberal internationalism and human rights. Rather than view mid-twentieth-century human rights history as a tale of the 1940s emergence of global civil society and US ethical cosmopolitanism before the arrival of Cold War politics, we do better to see it more as a story of faltering attempts to forge a language of US universalism that would appeal to the moral imagination of the USA.

Solidarity, Sexuality, and Saving Muslim Women in Neoliberal Times

Desiring SolidaritySolidarity is a fundamental-even constitutive-concern of feminist theory and politics. Like a specter it haunts feminist imaginations periodically. Yet it is a slippery term. Certain expressions of feminist solidarity, we know, often gloss over divisions the name of unity. The pursuit of solidarity along these registers, I suggest, expresses a longing as much as it represents a political goal.1 Perhaps this desire (for home? for the transcendence of privilege and so a point of arrival?) explains the persistence or at least periodic revival of a language of sisterhood that is otherwise discredited.The trope of global sisterhood is especially powerful today; its affective power allows for its reinvention different idioms at different times. Most recently, neoliberal discursive regimes Euro-America have revived both global sisterhood and a politics of salvation/caring, deftly folding them into corporate marketing strategies. So it is that, for instance, the Whole Foods grocery store chain solicits donations for its microcredit programs for women in the developing world, as part of its stated mission to produce a future without poverty. In the same vein, the French luxury cosmetics company Clarins's FEED 15 campaign, as an expression of its humanitarian values, provides meals to hungry children worldwide through the World Food Program.2 Both ventures appeal, different ways, to a global cosmopolitan feminist sentiment located the North. By implication, the present of women and children Europe and the United States excludes poverty and hunger.3In this short essay, I am mainly interested the discourses of solidarity and sisterhood opened up by the collapse of Rana Plaza Savar, Bangladesh, 2013, which over eleven hundred garment factory workers were killed. Not surprisingly, First World solidarity with Third World workers figured centrally the coverage following the disaster. As horrifying images of the tragedy and its aftermath circulated across global media, the incident was rendered a spectacle for consumption. Like other such events, it was open to the most incendiary mobilizations.The new socially conscious Pope Francis immediately denounced as slave labor the working conditions Bangladeshi garment factories (Bangladesh 'Slave Labor' 2013). A year later, at a conference convened by the International Labor Rights Forum called Women's Rights the Apparel Industry: Ending Violence, Empowering Voices, a participant declared, We want to take these women out of The head of the National Organization for Women, a rousing speech, also condemned as slave labor factory work places like Bangladesh and Honduras.It is not my intention to caricature individuals or impugn their motives. I do not doubt the sincerity of individual concerns, feminist or otherwise. My interest rather is the work of the trope of slavery. Like trafficking and forced labor, slavery performs a specific discursive-ideological function. Its persuasive power lies representing extremes such as the Rana Plaza collapse as being outside the legitimate liberal capitalist system rather than constitutive of the system itself.In contrast to such incendiary calls to solidarity, a more informed and nuanced transnational activism around sweatshop labor foregrounds the essential complicity of Northern corporations and Bangladeshi capitalists the making of incidents such as the Rana Plaza collapse. This is critical terrain, which labor activists Bangladesh work side by side with activists the United States.4 For the most part, however, antisweatshop campaigns hinge on the power of the affluent Northern consumer to save poor Third World women through the former's ethical consumption practices. Solidarity is decidedly vertical.The Marketplace of SolidarityAs indicated earlier, feminist solidarity of a neoliberal kind has been marketized the global economy. …

The Vicious Circles of Habermas’ Cosmopolitics

Habermas’ cosmopolitan project seeks to transform global politics into an emancipatory activity in order to compensate for the disempowering effects of globalization. The project is traced through three vicious circles which stem from Habermas’ commitment to intersubjectivity. Normative politics always raises a vicious circle because politics is only needed to the extent that an issue has become problematized through want of intersubjective agreement. At domestic level Habermas solves this problem by constitutionalizing transcendental presuppositions that political participants cannot avoid making. This fix will not work at the global level because it is pre-political as between human individuals. Habermas therefore premises cosmopolitics on the transformation of nation-states into sites of participatory politics, engagement in which will eventually ignite a global cosmopolitan consciousness. This transformation depends on the constitutionalization of existing UN structures and their enforcement of an undefined and (therefore) ‘uncontroversial’ core of human rights. Unable to ground this project in social practice, Habermas eventually disregards his own lodestar of intersubjectivity based in social practice by relying on the prediscursive concept of human dignity. This move is not merely philosophically inconsistent; it also opens the door to the moralization of politics and the imposition of human rights down the barrel of a gun.

Global South cosmopolitans: the opening and closing of the USA–Mexico border for Mexican tourists

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010.

Social Class, Habitus, and Language Learning: The Case of Korean Early Study-Abroad Students

In this article, I draw on Bourdieu’s (1984, 1991) notion of habitus in order to explore the relationship between social class, language learning, and language teaching in the context of the global economy. To illustrate my points, I use Early Study Abroad (ESA), the transnational educational migration that Korean middle-class families engage in in order to acquire valuable forms of global English capital. Through a discussion of the identities and language practices of Korean ESA students in Toronto, where they invested in a class-based consumption of Korean language and culture to contest the racial and linguistic stigmatization they experienced in the local context, and to index their global cosmopolitanism, I reveal how the concept of class privilege in actual practice is multilayered and sometimes contradictory; moreover, I posit that acquiring linguistic capital and leveraging it to gain class privilege are difficult and fraught ventures.

Mind the Gap: Gender Differences in Global Leadership Competencies and Why It Matters

Global mindset is a collection of competencies that are critical for effective global leadership. We find a significant difference in the global mindset competencies that men and women bring to leadership roles: women score higher than men on intercultural empathy, diplomacy, passion for diversity, and global psychological capital overall, whereas men score higher than women on interpersonal impact, global business savvy, cosmopolitan outlook, and global intellectual capital overall. These differences highlight potentially important deficits in the gender-homogeneous senior leadership ranks of most global companies and signal the need for the inclusion and encouragement of both genders in senior leadership roles.

Antecedents to fashion clothing involvement: role of global self-identity, cosmopolitanism, and normative influence

This research examines the influence of cosmopolitanism, identification with global consumers, and consumers' susceptibility to interpersonal influence (CSII) on Indian consumers' fashion clothing involvement. A survey technique was used for data collection across seven cities in India. Both metropolitan and non-metropolitan cities were targeted. The cosmopolitanism factor loaded under two factors: cosmopolitanism related to lifestyle (CRL) and cosmopolitanism related to cultural mores (CRCM). The value-expressive factors of normative influence, CRL, self-identification with global consumers, and type of city (metropolitan or non-metropolitan) influenced Indian consumers' fashion clothing involvement.The fashion clothing market is growing in India, but there is limited research seeking to understand the factors influencing fashion clothing involvement. Findings on the influence of global lifestyle, cosmopolitanism, and normative beliefs regarding Indian consumers' fashion clothing involvement can be helpful to companies targeting Indian consumers.

The Vicious Circles of Habermas' Cosmopolitics

Habermas' cosmopolitan project seeks to transform global politics into an emancipatory activity in order to compensate for the disempowering effects of globalization. The project is traced through three vicious circles which stem from Habermas' commitment to intersubjectivity. Normative politics always raises a vicious circle because politics is only needed to the extent that an issue has become problematized through want of intersubjective agreement. At the domestic level Habermas solves this problem by constitutionalizing transcendental presuppositions political participants cannot avoid making. This fix will not work at the global level because it is pre-political as between human individuals. Habermas therefore premises cosmopolitics on the transformation of nation-states into sites of participatory politics, engagement in which will eventually ignite a global cosmopolitan consciousness. This transformation depends on the constitutionalization of existing UN structures and their enforcement of an undefined and (therefore) 'uncontroversial' core of human rights. Unable to ground this project in social practice, Habermas eventually disregards his own lodestar of intersubjectivity based in social practice by relying on the prediscursive concept of human dignity. This move is not merely philosophically inconsistent, it also opens the door to the moralization of politics and the imposition of human rights down the barrel of a gun.

Being-in-the-world: the Afropolitan Moroccan author's worldview in the new millennium

In the last decade, many contemporary African authors of French expression from both North and sub-Saharan Africa have posited perspectives in their novels that reveal a global cosmopolitanism that uniquely defines African literature in the twenty-first century. Moroccan authors writing in French such as Youssouf Amine Elalamy and Fouad Laroui, among others, promote a way of being African in the world that disassociates the author from the literary tropes of earlier decades. They no longer dwell on the angst of the postcolonial condition, the traumas rooted in tensions between modernity and traditionalism, the sociocultural and economic divisions between North and sub-Saharan Africa, poverty and despair. Moroccan authors promote an ‘Afropolitanism’ in their works that connotes movement forward, to engage in becoming something other than the pessimistic stereotypes associated with Morocco as well as the African continent. Au cours de la dernière décennie, de nombreux auteurs africains contemporainsd'expression française du Maghreb et de l'Afrique sub-saharienne proposent des perspectives dans leurs romans qui révèlent un cosmopolitisme global qui définit de façon unique la littérature africaine du XXIe siècle. Les auteurs marocains écrivant en français comme Youssouf Amine Elalamy et Fouad Laroui, entre autres, soutiennent une manière d’être africaine dans le monde qui dissocie l'auteur des tropes littéraires des décennies précédentes. Ils se centrent moins sur les sujets tels que l'angoisse de la condition postcoloniale, les traumatismes socioculturels enracinés dans les tensions entre la modernité et le traditionalisme, les divisions socioculturelles et économiques entre le Maghreb et l'Afrique subsaharienne, la pauvreté et le désespoir. Les auteurs marocains promeuvent un « Afropolitanisme » dans leurs œuvres qui évoque un mouvement vers l'avant pour engager autres choses que les stéréotypes pessimistes associés au Maroc ainsi qu'au continent africain.

Calling Local/Talking Global: the cosmo-politics of the call-center industry

This article considers dramatic performances of cosmopolitan encounters within the transnational framework of the call-center industry in India. Have the virtual intimacies generated by new media and market technologies ushered in a cosmopolitan connectivity? What utopic gestures do we glimpse from portrayals of cross-cultural contact in the age of the copy? By considering the intersection of consumer fantasy, global capital, and the neoliberal state, this article tracks the affinities between economic globalization and cultural cosmopolitanism.