Transnational Sphere Research Articles

The non-existence of private self-regulation in the transnational sphere and its implications for the responsibility to procure legitimacy: The case of thelex sportiva

AbstractThis article is a critical examination of the claim that the emergence of private self-regulatory regimes in the transnational sphere signals a new trend of self-constitutionalization outside the limits of nation-state based or intergovernmental control. It deals with the question to what extent the diffusion of public authority in the sphere beyond the state affects the responsibility of the state(s) to procure the legitimacy of such private self-regulation. First, a conceptual argument is developed which identifies private self-regulatory regimes as rule systems nested in a specific constitutional order of the international society, here described as ‘neo-Westphalian’ (Section I). Second, implications for the responsibility to procure the legitimacy of collectively binding regulatory functions performed by private actors in the sphere beyond the state are considered (Section II). Often cited as a model example of autonomous societal self-regulation, thelex sportivarenders particularly strong plausibility for the claimed non-existence of purely private self-regulation. The regulation of performance-enhancing substances can serve to demonstrate the complex interactions between multiple public and private sites of constitutional authority (Section III). In conclusion (Section IV), I argue that, although the ultimate responsibility for providing legitimacy continues to lie with the state/world of states, the political order of the international society as construed in neo-Westphalian terms provides a dispersed and fragmented constitutional-style legal framework with few reliable guarantees that states are capable or willing to enact their background role. Therefore, a substantial part of the burden of – initial – legitimation must be carried by those directly involved in private self-regulation by constituting and exercising public authority.

Introduction to the religious lives of migrant minorities: a transnational and multi‐sited perspective

AbstractThis introduction describes the evolution of the conceptual framework that guided the research and analysis of findings from an international research project bringing a multi‐sited and transnational perspective to the study of the religious lives of migrant minorities. The project began by identifying potential contributions that studies of religion, migration and diversity offered one another. To research these issues, the project members investigated the lives of migrants who identify themselves as Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists, who live as minorities within three urban contexts, and whose different national regimes for governing migrant and religious diversity have been shaped historically by the British Empire (London, Johannesburg, Kajang‐Kuala Lumpur). The researchers employed a biographic method of investigation in order to examine how migrants organized their religious lives within individual, familial, communal, urban, national and transnational spheres. To understand the intertwining between migratory and religious aspects of the migrants' lives on each of these levels, the project members focused their analysis of the research findings in relation to three themes: migratory and spiritual journeys, sacred and secular place‐making, and the circulation of people, objects, practices, and faiths. The introduction highlights how each of the articles in this collection both reflect and contribute to this intellectual framing in order to understand the interplay between religion, migration, and diversity.

Legal Patterns of Global Governance: Participatory Transnational Governance

Multilevel trade governance and transnational social regulation put democratic self-regulation under stress. A growing number of supra- and transnational norms, rules, and regulations on trade, environmental issues, or any other field of regulation, prove that we are facing another great transformation, the transformation of international relations and intergovernmental politics into law-generating fora, with government and private networks and a number of court-like institutions as central actors. This process of transnational juridification limits parliamentary rooms for manoeuvre and comprehensively alienates many citizens submitted to transnational regulation from this process. This contribution attempts to clarify the mechanisms at work. In a second step it seeks to identify possible concepts that could grasp this transformation, and confronts them again with the problem of self-government. In a bow to the particularities of the transnational sphere, it tries to resist the methodological nation-state trap. Instead, it supports a constitutionalization of participative structures in global administrative governance. The outline, degree, and limits of such a concept are not self-explaining. The EU and its attempts to integrate civic participation, thus, may illustrate concrete outlines of such a project. This reconstruction allows for concluding observations on global structures and the constitutionalization of participatory transnational governance on a global scale.

Transnationalising Disability Studies: Rights, Justice and Impairment

In this paper we aim to explore the realm of impairment in terms of its politicization under transnational claims for justice. The realm of disability rights and justice has been a central theme in disability analytical inquiry and by disability movement actors engaged in struggles of disability affirmative politics. Within this frame, there has been an increasing amount of disability scholarship and activism at the transnational sphere. In fact, since the ratification of the UNCRPD (2006) greater transnational alliances have become a central feature to advancing disability affirmative claims for rights and justice. While welcomed, we argue that within the transnational realm, the focus on disability alone critically marginalizes those groups engaging in repertories of action within the logos of impairment as transnational claims for disability justice tend to naturalise impairment and negate the production of impairment under global structural processes of violence. To address this issue, we suggest that the growing scholarship on transnational theorizing and activism within disability needs to respond to these claims for justice and rights. To conclude we argue that transnational theorizing and praxis is in fact, a double move – an affirmative politics of disability rights and justice and a transformative politics of impairment. Keywords: impairment, justice, rights, disability politics, majority world, justice, North–South power relations, Southern epistemologies

Role of National Law in International Investment Law System: A Competitor, a Supplementary or a Cooperator?

As a typical area of transnational law, international investment law is piercing the veil of sovereignty and blurring, if not dissolving, the boundaries between municipal law system (NL) and international investment law system (IIL). The interaction between NL and IIL is further complicated when considerable discretion of arbitral tribunal over reviewing governmental actions encounters inconclusive but multifaceted relevance of law of host state in arbitral proceedings. The legal status, the impact and the potential function of national law at both specific arbitral proceeding level and institutional level in international investment law system are under-theorized, which partly present itself as and partly generate the seemingly divergent arbitral practices of tribunals. Therefore, it is of great practical and theoretical significance to figure out the (potential) role of national law in international investment law system from a dynamic institutional perspective. This paper first appraises the role of NL in specific investment treaty arbitration from three perspectives, namely, NL as fact, NL as evidence and NL as governing law. The inquiry then goes beyond the sphere of individual arbitration to the systematic dynamics of IIL: NL as a template for negotiation and renegotiations of investment agreements, NL as state practices leading to the development of customary law and NL as recognition and enforcement of IIL.The paper further explores the institutional structure of governance system over transnational investment activities and argues that IIL and Investor-State Dispute Resolution (ISDS) mechanisms are smart governance mechanisms for purely or mainly economic disputes concerning investment. However, IIL is not of institutional advantages over NL when investment related disputes are of great social influence and political impacts. The normative delimitation of regulatory boundary of NL vis-a-vis IIL over transnational investment related activities lies in the equilibrium between competing parameters, namely marketable interest concerns and socialized (and political, to the most extent thereof) interest concerns. The more marketable the targeted investment related matter is, the more involved IIL should be. The paper further argues that an interdependent, hybrid and poli-contextual governance network is emerging in transnational investment regulation. Based on comparative advantages of both NL and IIL system, the governance network is and shall be distinct from both totally free competitive approach and total hierarchy approach, and of the institutional capacity to exercise the comparative advantages of both systems without functionally distorting the other while capable of coping cope with the constantly changeable and multifaceted regulatory context in transnational investment sphere.

Antiglobalization and Radical Environmentalism: An Exchange on Ethical Grounds

Since 1992, clandestine radical environmentalist cells, calling themselves the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), have carried out arson attacks in an effort to punish corporations for environmentally deleterious practices. I examine the radical environmental movement and find that its recent rise to prominence and notoriety is part and parcel of the larger development of the more general anti-globalization/anti-capitalist movement. Specifically, I examine how, despite its libertarian conservative origins, the ideology of Earth First! changed after an influx of new members with anti-state, anarchist sympathies. Finally, I assess the applicability of three major criticisms of “globalization from below” to the case of the ELF, namely: a) that its preoccupation with the transnational sphere and abandonment of electoral politics is misguided, b) that direct actions such as property destruction are counterproductive to the wider aims of the movement, and, c) that its strategies of contention are too episodic, and do very little to encourage practical, inclusive, local, and sustained action in the service of global justice

Collective Identities in Migration. Biographical Perspectives on Ambivalences and Paradoxes

Notwithstanding the deconstruction of essentialist concepts of national or ethnic identity also with respect to the growing movements between nation states and developing transnational spheres (1-4), to construct collective belongings with references to imagined communities(5) based in nation, culture or ethnicity still seems to be a relevant social practice. At the same time, we can observe increasing ambivalences and even paradoxes inherent in these practices. They show when looking at biographical processes in which collective belongings concretely take shape. Based on empirical research on East-West European migration during the Cold War (6), I would like to demonstrate in this article how different biographical experiences interconnect when national, cultural, ethnic or other collective identities emerge, and also when they drop to the background in processes of undoing a collective identity.

CARRYING THE BURDEN OF PAST VIOLENCES

Through a comparative study of two Palestinian transnational youth movements, this article seeks to understand how the transnational sphere traverses not just space but also time. I analyze how the Palestinian Youth Movement and the Gaza Youth Breaks Out movement understand themselves as carrying the burden of past violences in their promise to continue the Palestinian struggle and lead it toward a just and peaceful solution. Particularly, I am interested in how these movements interpret and conceive of the violences of 1948 and their continuation in present violences from different temporal, and not just spatial, standpoints. I examine the temporalities from which and to which transnational Palestinian movements speak, as well as how they orient themselves, through backward and forward movements, toward past–present–future. The article highlights how temporal differences form tensions that are often overlooked by transnational scholars and activists.

In praise of doubt: Academic virtues, transnational encounters and the problem of the public

Inspired by the ‘rise of Asia’ in academia, this article explores the question of academic publics: who are we addressing in our writing and teaching? With the increasing globalisation of academic life, the global rise of the neoliberal university and, as Latour puts it, ‘critique running out of steam’ in the West, the question of academic publics becomes increasingly pressing, especially for cultural studies. This article proposes that transnational academic encounters may offer a way out of the crisis of critique and a transnational ethics of scholarly virtues, stressing the personal predispositions and concomitant practices that shape the distinct quality of academic inquiry. It highlights five main academic virtues: doubt, systematic analysis, realism, complexity and slowness. Of these five virtues, doubt (of oneself) is the central academic virtue: it should take center stage in university teaching, academic writing and in academic forays into the public and the transnational spheres.

The transnational sphere of justice: disability praxis and the politics of impairment

In this paper, my aim is to elaborate disability movement praxis so that transnational struggles for justice over the production of impairment emerging from the Global South can be represented within the transnational frame of disability politics. The paper seeks to explore the potential of deepening socio-political understandings of impairment as a means to radically democratize disability movement politics at the transnational scale to encompass pluralist, yet subaltern, collective claims for justice. I am guided by the question: if impairment is the place that makes visible invisible debts, can the global disability rights movement begin a process of re-identification to open the boundaries of disability justice claims and develop a strategic orientation which recognizes those collective justice claims for geopolitically produced impairments?

Frágeis e perigosos: a repercussão internacional da violência contra estrangeiros durante o golpe de 1973 no Chile

The denial of citizenship rights make the international migrants more vulnerable to violence, especially when it comes from the state. However, the case of foreigners affected by the violence of the Chilean military coup of 1973 demonstrated that with the globalization, they can become an important channel of complaint once thrown into the transnational sphere. This article, based on an analysis of diplomatic documents available for research and interviews, aims to understand how this projection may represent a threat to state sovereignty. It is argued that the 1973 coup is an emblematic moment in the process of strengthening the agenda of human rights and participation of society in the international scene.

Reconstituting the affective labour of Filipinos as care workers in Japan

AbstractAs Japan has started to come to terms with the emergence of an ageing society with a low birth rate, it has also had to face a shortage of care labour. Both the state and individuals have mobilized new sources of care work, and in so doing have transformed relations between Asian countries. Within this context, there has been a change in that long‐term Filipina residents in Japan are now seen as an alternative source of care workers. Previous relations between Japan and the Philippines were structured through the experience of Filipina entertainers and hostesses. Yet, a shift to Filipina migrant care workers in response to labour market demands has been accompanied by a discursive transformation that affect long‐term Filipina residents in Japan. Based on ethnographic observation of a course run for caregivers, in this article I examine how foreign nationals' affective labour can be perceived. I further propose locating care within a broader transnational sphere, a ‘curo‐scape’ that is to say, a transnational sphere of administering and managing care at not just a transregional and global level but also at a local state one.

Private International Law Beyond the Schism

The aim of this project is to explore the ways in which, in the absence of traditional forms of government in a global setting, the law can discipline the transnational exercise of private power by a variety of market actors (from rating agencies, technical standard-setters and multi-national agribusinesses to vulture funds). Traditionally, the cross-border economic activities of non-state actors fall within the remit of an area of the law known as ‘private international law’. However, despite the contemporary juridification of international politics, private international law has contributed very little to the global governance debate, remaining remarkably silent before the increasingly unequal distribution of wealth and authority in the world. By abandoning such matters to its public international counterpart, it leaves largely untended the private causes of crisis and injustice affecting such areas as financial markets, environmental protection, pollution, the status of sovereign debt, the bartering (or confiscation) of natural resources and land, the use (and misuse) of development aid, (unequal) access to food, the status of migrant populations, and many more. On the other hand, public international law itself, on the tide of managerialism and fragmentation, is now increasingly confronted with conflicts articulated as collisions of jurisdiction and applicable law, among which private or hybrid authorities and regimes now occupy a significant place. According to the genealogy of private international law depicted here, the discipline has developed, under the aegis of the liberal divides between law and politics and between the public and the private spheres, a form of epistemological tunnel-vision, actively providing immunity and impunity to abusers of private sovereignty. It is now more than time to de-closet private international law and excavate the means with which, in its own right, it may impact upon the balance of informal power in the global economy. This means both quarrying the new potential of human rights in the transnational sphere, and rediscovering the specific savoir-faire acquired over many centuries in the recognition of alterity and the responsible management of pluralism. In short, adopting a planetary perspective means reaching beyond the schism between the public and private spheres and connecting up with the politics of international law.

Powerful cultural productions: Identity politics in diasporic same-sex South Asian weddings

Queer diasporic subjects are multiply displaced and often excluded from familial, local, national, and transnational spheres. This ethnographic study examines five same-sex South Asian American Hindu wedding ceremonies to demonstrate that these events are spaces where power and one’s inclusion into the dominant social structure are negotiated. The ritualized performances and social interactions surrounding these ceremonies serve to enact, articulate and transform culture. The ceremonies enable the actors to claim ownership of tradition, and insert their subjectivities into one of its most fundamental institutions. While the structures of power operate most visibly on macro-political levels, they are often replicated, resisted, and subverted in numerous intimate arenas of lived experience, such as wedding ceremonies.

Global Governance and Conflict of Laws from a Foucauldian Perspective: The Power/Knowledge Nexus Revisited

Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault, this article sheds light on the tension-rich interactions between state-based law and the emerging power mechanisms of the transnational sphere. Besides norms and standards, private governance also includes the evolution of knowledge practices such as auditing, surveillance, rating and benchmarking. These practices can cause manifold legal conflicts, which call for specific forms of coordination. This is all the more true since the transnational sphere has evolved into a battlefield of numerous, often highly conflicting governance regimes, which often come with their own rationalities, problem-definitions and ideologies. Lawyers seeking to incorporate the emerging extra-legal mechanisms into their decisions must try to inquire into the whole range of divergent governmental practices in the relevant field, so that they do not become captivated by the particularistic rationality of one single initiative or regime. As an empirical illustration, I discuss ISO 14000 and its relation to some less formalised forms of corporate governance that have emerged as an alternative to the latter.

Whose legitimacy? Islamic finance and the global financial order

ABSTRACT Islamic finance is a fast growing segment of international financial markets. Deriving its core principles from the Quran and the Sharia, the objective of Islamic finance is to install a more equitable financial and economic order that at the same time is transaction-friendly. Thus, Islam could be seen as a foundation for the inclusion of the ethical and moral dimensions of economics and markets. This coincides with rising demand for Islamic financial products. Indeed, recent years have witnessed increasing efforts to develop and to institutionalise Islamic capital markets and above all, to make Islamic finance acceptable (and thus investable) to the mainstream. In this article, I use the question of legitimacy to explore whether Islamic finance offers an alternative to the existing international financial order. To this end, I take a closer look at the knowledge base from which Islamic financial products are constructed and assessed as well as the emerging international regulatory framework for Islamic financial markets. I conclude that efforts to expand the social constituency of Islamic finance to the transnational sphere of global finance are overly focused on its epistemic legitimation as normal financial activity. As a consequence, the currently emerging power, knowledge and governance structures for Islamic finance tend to emulate, and therefore largely reproduce, the existing global financial order.

‘Great friends’: Creating legacies, networks and policies that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe

This article highlights the uses of friendship by associations that perpetuate the memory of the Fathers of Europe. It demonstrates that the invention of the tradition of the ‘Fathers of Europe’ is not the monopoly of European institutions. It was made possible by the mobilization of associations of heirs that have perpetuated these Fathers’ memory since the 1960s. From a social history perspective, the article analyzes some case studies that show how associations of friends devoted to the Fathers of Europe have been created, and what kind of activities they have led throughout time. International friendship emerges as a set of reconstructed memories through the practices of the transnational spheres, by transforming a dead friend into an exemplary friend in order to legitimize a certain vision of the European past.

Multilingual Cosmopolitanism and Monolingual Commodification: Language Ideologies in Transnational Salsa Communities

AbstractSalsa, a global urban music and dance phenomenon, is an interesting example for the emergence of transnational cultural spheres. Salsa has its roots in the Americas and in many Salsa communities outside of Latin America, the Spanish language is seen as the authentic means of expression. However, attitudes to multilingualism can differ strongly from Salsa community to Salsa community.In this paper, the Salsa-scene of Sydney is introduced with its various stances towards multilingualism. These are connected to different styles of the dance, where one style is practiced in English only, while dancers of another style are often bilingual speakers of Spanish and English. Monolingualism and multilingualism here mediate the affiliation to different local scenes. Simultaneously, both language ideologies relate to different global discourses of competitive and cosmopolitan culture. It will be asked whether the introduced language ideologies challenge traditional frameworks of society and reified discursive concepts of language. (Multilingualism – Transnationalism – Cosmopolitanism)*

INDIA, THE BHAGAVAD GITA AND THE WORLD

This essay considers the relationship between the Bhagavad Gita as a transnational text and its changing role in Indian political thought. Indian liberals used it to mark out the boundaries between the public sphere they desired and a reformed Hinduism. Indian intellectuals also used the image of Krishna to construct an all-wise founder figure for the new India. Meanwhile, in the transnational sphere of debate, the Gita came to represent India itself in the works of theosophists, spiritual relativists and a variety of intellectual radicals, who approved of the text's ambivalent view of the relationship between political action and the World Spirit. After the First World War, Indian liberals, notably Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, philosopher and later India's second president, used Krishna's words to urge a new and humane international politics infused with the ideal of “detached action”.

Between “Publicness” and “Publicity”: Conceptualizing Discourse “Assemblages” of Public Legitimacy in Transnational Spaces

Over the last two years, a number of debates emerged which aim to reconceptualize the public sphere as a space of public legitimacy in the context of transnational communication. This is obviously not an easy task as the conceptual construction of what we mean by “public discourse” and in fact, “legitimacy” is still today deeply associated with the historical development of public deliberation, enabled through the formation of modern European nation-states. Most of these debates build on the Habermasian framework which is then extended to a transnational terrain. Some of recent approaches, for example, identify a new relation between national and transnational spheres in the formation of social movements or “transgressive” publics (Gilman-Opalsky, 2008), discuss new transnational forms of international relations (Crack, 2008), describe the influence of deliberative transnational publics in the context of new global governance structures (Held & Koenig-Archibugi, 2005) and discuss public deliberation in a variety of societal models (see Weden, 2008).