Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: I seek to investigate the potential of cosmopolitanism to function as an emancipatory discourse for contemporary subaltern struggles. The normative dimension of the project argues that cosmopolitanism cannot act as a vehicle for the realisation of the ends of such struggles unless it can endorse - indeed champion - a certain notion of subaltern community. The empirical dimension of the project constructs portraits of actors in world politics who are able to do this: 'actually existing cosmopolitanisms' that, while acknowledging membership in a common humanity, seek to construct strong particularist collective agency. The specific actors I am interested in are players in the field of 'anti-globalisation' protest in the Indian subcontinent. In constructing portraits of these actors, I draw quite substantially on the metaphors for globality and locality that animate their political claims and propaganda. I also suggest that these metaphors are prefigured by an earlier generation of political actors in the Indian independence movement, who sought to mediate between the global and the local in a similar fashion - though for different political ends.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Following the work of Hartz and Hofstadter, the study of American political thought has generally emphasized the role of consensus, particularly with respect to the liberal tradition in American history. But merely emphasizing the liberal consensus does not, in itself, enable us to account for the parallel experience of great conflict in American history—conflict that cannot be explained, if we accept the Hartz thesis, simply in terms of a grand struggle between “liberalism and its challengers.” To understand the nature of American political conflict, we must look beyond the consensus approach—and, to the extent that we accept Hartz, we must also look beyond the liberal tradition to an alternative theoretical perspective.
My paper argues for a new approach to the study of American political history—one that emphasizes, not the role of liberalism, but the role of cosmopolitanism in the shaping of American political institutions and thought. I contend that the history of American conflict is best understood as a larger struggle between the cosmopolitan vision of the Enlightenment and the competing visions of ‘America’ that challenge it: pre-Madisonian republicanism; modern nationalism; and messianic, interventionist universalism. I conclude by sketching the ways in which this approach might manifest itself in the study of American political history, emphasizing the conflicts surrounding Constitutional ratification and the crises leading up to the Civil War.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The writings of Levinas and Derrida are increasingly brought into the discussions of world politics, often at their face value and not as before the Face of the Other, as both Levinas and Derrida would demand. No wonder, the debate is reduced to Derrida being time and again accused of nihilism but insisting that the accusation is misplaced and that the accusers should reread his texts, for, of course, there is a right track, a better way (Derrida, 'Limited Inc'). I reread Levinas and Derrida in their conversation about Ethics to contemplate about what it might mean for a post-structuralist to say in one sentence, separated by a comma, that there is a right track, a better way. The assertion of a right track is suspicious and points, perhaps, in the direction of those accusing Derrida not of nihilism but of Hegelianism. The conception of a better way, however, is much more subtle. It allows for a post-structuralist critique of the established theories of Cosmopolitan Justice (the paper will concentrate of the proposals by Habermas, Rawls and Walzer). This critique, in turn, is a fertile ground to explore the arguments at the heart of the modern debate on the prospects of global justice. First, ethics, as an idea we have inherited, is by nature post-structuralist. Recall Socrates that justice requires incessant deconstruction, for an answer to what is due may depend on something as incidental as whether someone has just gone mad (Plato, 'The Republic'). I will suggest that the appreciation of the situational nature of justice is in fact not foreign to Walzer, Rawls and Habermas. Second, the post-structuralist nature of ethics renders any particular and universalizing ethics scheme unethical, resulting in contradictions in Levinas and Derrida as much as in Rawls, Walzer and Habermas. Thus, on the one hand, Levinas and Derrida are true to post-structuralism in their affirmation that ethics is not an achieved body of principles, norms and rules already codified in texts and traditions [and awaiting extension into the Other's spaces]. It is an ongoing historical practice (Walker, 'Inside / Outside'). On the other hand, however, both are uncomfortable with the ongoing and strive for a closure in the form of apparently messianic responsibility for the Other, derived from Levinas' Dostoyevsky-style guilt or Derrida's vulnerability exposed at the encounter with the Other. Specifically, I ask: Does not Levinas' ethics of acknowledging the irreducibility of the Other unavoidably reduces the Other to the order of the Same (Levinas, 'Totality and Infinity')? Does not Derrida, too, reconcile the irreconcilable that a) deconstruction operates on the basis of an infinite idea of justice and b) deconstructive justice (the ethics of responsibility) is owed to the Other by the mere fact of a response (Derrida, 'Force of Law')? Third, the post-structuralist nature of ethics does not logically lead to nihilism. Nihilism is a sibling of religion. Whereas religion says that there is the God, nihilism say there is Nothing; the God is dead. In this certainty, Nietzsche is modern. Being post-modern is being denied the privilege of even this kind of certainty: the God may or may not be dead! There may be something as much as there may be nothing! It is this ever present possibility of the existence of something that renders ethics meaningful. It is also this possibility that seems to render any attempt at closure by way of a theory of justice, even in the most post-structuralist form, unethical.