scholarly journals Representation as power and performative practice: Global civil society advocacy for working children

2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-226 ◽  
Author(s):  
ANNA HOLZSCHEITER
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Child Labour ◽  
Working Children

AbstractThis article analyses global civil society advocacy in the field of child labour through the lens of theories on political representation in global governance. The article is sympathetic to newer theories on political representation which, fundamentally, understand representation as a dialectic of performative practices between representatives and their real or imagined constituencies. However, the article argues that the contemporary literature on political representation turns a blind eye on two aspects that are central to understanding this dialectic of representation in the child labour case: first, representation as power and second, the contested nature of citizenship. The article thus proposes an approach to political representation that allows highlighting the power-dimension inherent to the interrelation between formal and performative aspects of representation, that is, between civil society actors’ power to represent and their power over representation. Using such an approach, the article presents empirical insights on CSO representation in global policymaking on child labour – a field in which conflicts over legitimate representation, citizenship, and grassroots participation continue to be exceptionally fierce.

Perpetual Peace or Perpetual Process: Global Civil Society and Cosmopolitan Legality at the World Trade Organization

2003 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 673-699 ◽  
Author(s):  
RUTH BUCHANAN
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
World Trade Organization ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
World Trade ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Theoretical Approaches ◽  
Perpetual Peace ◽  
The World ◽  
History Of ◽  
Preceding Discussion

This article argues that a contemporary form of ‘cosmopolitan legality’ serves as an animating force behind contemporary practices of global civil society and global governance. The first part provides an account of the recent history of civil society engagement with the World Trade Organization. It observes that civil society groups have focused their collective efforts on issues relating to procedural legitimacy, including accountability, openness, and transparency, potentially to the detriment of efforts to bring about more fundamental change. In the second part of the article, various theoretical approaches to cosmopolitan legality are discussed, including their claimed Kantian origins, and are mapped on to the preceding discussion of the place of a global public sphere in global governance. Programmatic approaches that purport to mobilize cosmopolitanism in the service of either a political or legal project are ultimately rejected, and a provisional alternative reading is suggested.

Civil Society

2018 ◽  
pp. 682-696
Author(s):  
Karen Buckley
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Critical Dialogue ◽  
The World ◽  
Society Research

For all its myriad debates, interpretations, and discussions, research on detailing and imagining civil society, global civil society, and associated social relations is constrained in how it conceives global social relations. There is confusion as to whether civil society and global civil society refer to an analytical concept or an actually existing reality or both simultaneously. This chapter adds a missing dimension to these discussions through engaging a critical dialogue or dialectics between concept and reality in civil society research on the nature and extent of civil society particularly as they relate to global governance and contestation. The theoretical and practical activities of civil society, seen through a dialectical lens of the world, are related in the conclusion to a greater understanding of movement and change through the processes of transversal hegemony.

The power of representation: democratic politics and global governance

2003 ◽  
Vol 29 (S1) ◽  
pp. 97-118 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandro Colás
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Global Governance ◽  
Global Civil Society ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
Democratic Politics ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Management ◽  
New Form

The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.

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