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Given the new-found importance of the commons in current political discourse, it has become increasingly necessary to explore the democratic, institutional, and legal implications of the commons for global governance today. This book analyses and explores the ground-breaking model of the commons and its relation to these debates.
Borders are both a door and a bridge. Because they are operating at a critical juncture between security expectations and intense cross-border exchanges, they appear to be Janus-faced. To some, they are demarcating lines that call for extensive protection and a regime of strict closure. To others, they are a gateway to transnational opportunities and their opening should be carefully but liberally managed. The very same paradox affects the regions located alongside borders, that is the borderlands or frontier zones. Borderlands can be simultaneously depicted as epitomizing the growth of mutually beneficial transnational ties and as offering a privileged but bleak glimpse into the importation...
This book investigates the multifaceted conflicts of sovereignty in the recent crises in the European Union. Although the notion of sovereignty has been central in the contentious debates triggered by the recent crises in the European Union, it remains strikingly under-researched in political science. This book bridges this gap by providing both theoretical reflections and empirical analyses of today’s conflicts of sovereignty in the EU. More particularly, it investigates conflicts between four types of sovereignty. First, national sovereignty referring to the autonomy of the Westphalian Nation-State to rule on a territory delimited by borders; second, the supranational sovereignty acquire...
New Space technologies, Earth observation and satellite navigation in particular, have proven to be invaluable drivers of sustainable development, thus contributing to the protection of several human rights (the “Good”). At the same time, however, New Space technologies raise concerns for the right to privacy (the “Bad”), and face a number of challenges posed by hostile cyber operations (the “Ugly”). Dr. Arianna Vettorel analyzes the relevant international, European and domestic legal frameworks and highlights the need for several innovative approaches and reforms, in a transnational and bottom-up perspective, in order to maximize the Good, and minimize the Bad and the Ugly, of New Space technologies.
This book explores an often neglected current in contemporary French political thought that challenges the limits of the concept of democracy. It situates the projects of Jacques Ranciere, Claude Lefort and Miguel Abensour in relation to each other, as well as to the larger philosophical question of the nature of democracy itself. In doing so, Bryan Nelson illuminates democracy's potential as a profound emancipatory and transformative project, offering an unprecedented challenge to modes of domination, strategies of inequality and hierarchies of all kinds. Against prevailing interpretations, the author draws on the central concepts, problems and polemics in the works of Ranciere, Lefort and Abensour to develop a bold conception of democracy that allows us to rethink its character, power and broader social and political implications.
The first contemporary overview of the critiques of human rights in Western political thought, from the French Revolution to the present day.
An exploration of how contemporary art reframes and humanizes migration, calling for coexistence—the recognition of the interdependence of beings. In Art for Coexistence, art historian Christine Ross examines contemporary art’s response to migration, showing that art invites us to abandon our preconceptions about the current “crisis”—to unlearn them—and to see migration more critically, more disobediently. We (viewers in Europe and North America) must come to see migration in terms of coexistence: the interdependence of beings. The artworks explored by Ross reveal, contest, rethink, delink, and relink more reciprocally the interdependencies shaping migration today—connecting ci...
This book offers a comprehensive survey of the history of thought and practice of commoning of land from a social innovation perspective. Presenting refreshing theoretical and historical perspectives and examining three case-studies in great depth, it explores how social relations, ethics, and agencies affect the building and development Ð but also the decline Ð of Landed Commons.
This volume offers a systematic philosophical analysis of the normative challenges facing European refugee policy, focusing on whether the response to it can be based on European values. By considering the refugee policy through the lens of European values, cosmopolitan norms and universal human rights, the contributions expose the weaknesses and limitations of existing regulations and make proposals on how to improve them. The EU is often seen as a cosmopolitan project. Europe is supposed to be a community of states that aspires to be guided by cosmopolitan norms. However, the idea of a cosmopolitan Europe has never been unanimously shared, and in recent years, it has come under increasing ...
How does the dominant understanding(s) of the demo(i)cratic subject in the EU, and of democracy more broadly, shape the EU’s democratic innovations on ‘citizen participation’? What are the politically and normatively preferable alternatives, both in terms of the conceptualisation of the democratic subject in the EU and in the ensuing political practices? The book addresses these questions combining a political theory with a political sociology perspective, contrasting the ‘democracy without politics’ approach of the EU in the context of the Conference on the Future of Europe with that of ongoing transnational activist processes. In doing so, it develops an agonistic alternative to ‘the people(s)’ as the political imaginary of democracy in the EU, which is based on the idea of the ‘decolonial multitude’. Thus, the book puts forward a diagnosis of current debates on EU democratic legitimacy as well as proposing an alternative.