POLITICAL SCIENCE 410/510: Democracy beyond the State?

University of Oregon, Spring 2008 Instructor: James Ingram

Monday 2-4:50 Office: PLC 927

Room: PLC 605 Phone: 346-4707

Office hours: Tuesday 1-4 jingram@uoregon.edu

Democracy is now established as the leading principle of political legitimacy around the world, yet in its traditional forms it is widely agreed to be threatened by globalization. In this course we will read assessments of the development of transnational and global politics as well as prospects and proposals for their democratization. Along with basic issues in democratic theory, we will consider contemporary efforts to design or reform supranational institutions, debates over attempts to promote democracy and human rights internationally, and projects to foster democracy from below.

I assume that we’re coming to this seminar with different backgrounds and interests, and from across the subfields. In order to allow you explore themes of particular interest while keeping the class very much a seminar, the last three sessions will be devoted to discussing student-selected topics. Some topics may be more empirical and others more theoretical. I will provide a longer list of possibilities, and you are especially welcome to pursue topics that relate to past work or to a possible dissertation topic. The only stipulation is that they relate to both transnationalism and democracy. Examples might include:

• the EU as a model of a transnational political regime;
• humanitarian intervention/human rights enforcement;
• international law and the prospects for its democratization;
• the cultural specificity of democracy and/or human rights;
• transnational aspects of local movements (e.g., the Zapatistas, Indian dam mobilizations, etc.);
• the counter-globalization or anti-sweatshop movement;
• transnational environmental or human rights regimes; etc.

Obviously, your reading for the research paper will exceed what we can read together for the seminar, so your goal for the presentation should be to select writings that provide a good overview of the issue and promote discussion. The presentation and discussion will then serve as the basis for the paper due at the end of the quarter.

Academic Honesty

All work submitted in this course must be your own and produced exclusively for this course. The use of sources (ideas, quotations, paraphrases) must be properly acknowledged and documented. For the consequences of academic dishonesty, refer to the Schedule of Classes published quarterly. For any specific questions or concerns, please come talk to me before turning in an assignment.

Course Requirements and Grading

• Regular attendance and participation. (10%)
• FIVE short response papers over the course of the quarter. (1-2 pages each, 30%) These papers are due Sunday, the day before class, at midnight, and are to be posted in the appropriate forum on Blackboard. Each paper should with deal with one or perhaps two texts from the week’s reading, focusing on questions that relate to larger themes in the course. Each paper must conclude with two or three discussion questions. You are responsible for submitting five over the nine sessions. Start early!
• ONE short (ten-minute) presentation of a topic of your choice, followed by class discussion of readings of your selection. (10%)
• ONE short research paper. (15-20 pp., 40%, due 6/9)

Course Readings

All readings will be made available on Blackboard.

Course Schedule and Readings

NB: Readings subject to change.

rec. = supplementary but recommended

3/31: Introduction: Globalization

William Scheuerman, “Globalization,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall 2002/entries/globalization/

Michael Mann, “Globalizations: an introduction to the spatial and structural networks of globality,” ms.

Stanley Hoffmann, “Clash of Globalizations,” Foreign Affairs 81:4 (2002): 104-15.

Michael Parenti, “Globalization and Democracy: Some Basics,” Znet (May 27, 2007).

rec.: Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and its Discontents (Norton 2003).

Thomas Friedman, “It’s a Flat World After All,” New York Times Magazine (April 3, 2005).

4/7: Kantian Cosmopolitanism

Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose” and “Perpetual Peace,” in Reiss, ed., Kant: Political Writings (Cambridge 1991).

Jürgen Habermas, “Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?,” in The Divided West (Polity 2004), 115-78.

Walter Mignolo, “The Many Faces of Cosmo-polis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism,” in Breckenridge, Pollock, Bhabha, Chakrabarty, eds., Cosmopolitanism (Duke 2002), 157-88.

James Tully, “The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives,” in Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe (Cambridge 2003), 331-58.

4/14: Globalizing Democracy I

[PRESENTATION/REASEARCH PAPER TOPIC PROPOSALS]

John S. Dryzek, “Transnational Democracy,” Journal of Political Philosophy 7:1 (1999): 30-51.

David Held, “Democracy and Globalization,” in Archibugi, Held, and Köhler, eds., Re-imagining Political Community (Stanford 1998).

Michael Saward, “A Critique of Held,” in Holden, ed., Global Democracy: Key Debates (Routledge 1999).

David Chandler, “International Justice” and Nadia Urbinati, “Can Cosmopolitical Democracy Be Democratic?,” in Archibugi, ed., Debating Cosmopolitics (Verso 2003).

rec.: Robert Dahl, “Can International Organizations Be Democratic? A Skeptic's View,” in Shapiro and Hacker-Cordón, eds., Democracy's Edges (Cambridge 1999).

Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Routledge 2005), ch. 5.

4/21 Globalizing Democracy II

James Bohman, Democracy across Boundaries: From Demos to Demoi (MIT 2007), ch. 1.

Michael Goodhart, Democracy as Human Rights: Freedom and Equality in the Age of Globalization (Routledge 2005), ch. 7.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in an Age of Empire (Penguin 2004), chs. 1.3, 3.3.

rec.: Heikko Patomäki, “Problems of democratizing global governance: Time, space and the emancipatory process,” European Journal of International Affairs 9:3 (2003): 347-76.

R.B.J. Walker, “Polis, Cosmopolis, Politics,” Alternatives 28:2 (2003): 267-86.

4/28 Human Rights

Hannah Arendt, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism (HBJ 1973), ch. 9.

Seyla Benhabib, The Rights of Others (Cambridge 2004), ch. 2.

Jacques Rancière, “Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103:2/3 (2004): 297-310.

Giorgio Agamben, “Beyond Human Rights,” in Means without Ends (Minnesota 2000).

rec.: Chris Brown, “Universal Human Rights: A Critique,” in Dunne and Wheeler, eds., Human Rights in Global Politics (Cambridge 1999).

Bonnie Honig, “Another Cosmopolitanism? Law and Politics in the New Europe,” in Benhabib, Another Cosmopolitanism (Oxford 2006).

Slavoj Zizek, “Against Human Rights,” New Left Review 34 (2005): 115-31.

5/5: Transnational Activism and Global Civil Society

[PRESENTATION READINGS DUE]

Richard Falk, “Global Civil Society and the Democratic Prospect,” in Holden, ed., Global Democracy.

Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics (Cornell 1998), Introduction.

Sidney Tarrow and Donatella della Porta, “‘Globalization,’ Complex Internationalism, and Transnational Contention,” in Transnational Protest and Global Activism (Rowman and Littlefield 2005).

Kenneth Anderson and David Rieff, “Global civil society: A skeptical view,” in Anheier et al, eds., Global Civil Society Yearbook 2004/05 (Sage 2005), 26-39.

rec: David Kennedy, “The International Human Rights Movement: Part of the Problem?,” Harvard Human Rights Journal 15 (2002).

Mario Pianta, “Democracy vs. Globalization. The Growth of Parallel Summits and Global Movements,” in Archibugi, ed., Debating Cosmopolitics (Verso 2003).

Alex Demirovic, “NGOs, the State, and Civil Society: The Transformation of Hegemony,” Rethinking Marxism 15:2 (2003): 213-35.

5/12: Presentations I

5/19: Presentations II

(5/26 – MEMORIAL DAY – NO CLASS)

6/2: Presentations III

RESEARCH PAPER DUE MONDAY, JUNE 9 AT 4PM