CFP: Local Politics, Global Economics

MANCEPT WORKSHOP
8th -10th September, University of Manchester.

Local Politics, Global Economics

Conveners: Haye Hazenberg (Leuven), Christine Hobden (Oxford).

The debate on ‘global justice’ has significantly advanced in recent years, flourishing into several distinct subfields. From general theories, global justice issues are now often debated separately, ranging from topics such as fairness in trade, environmental justice, collective responsibility, the legitimacy of international law and the democratic character of global governance institutions.  A broader question, however, often lacks attention: to what extent do democratic principles support or remain in tension with wider principles of global justice?  While the need to address global injustice has become increasingly apparent, it is less clear where, and through what channels, these duties fall and should be fulfilled.

In this workshop, we welcome papers that look at these issues. The workshop will provide a forum to explore not only what global justice might look like, but more particularly the structures, mechanisms and models of responsibility through which it might best be achieved.  Is it for example possible to speak about one global basic structure, or is global justice best understood through distinct but overlapping practices, each of which generates new principles? And are state institutions constitutive of the global basic structure and of global practices, or does decentralized citizen action offer a better avenue for engaging the international economy?

We suspect that the distinction between political and economic duties will be particularly relevant in answering these questions. Where political duties remain largely bound to states, a global economic market complicates the political duties citizens of one state have towards citizens in other states. While in states economic duties are apt to be translated into political duties through institutions of justice, rights and democracy, opportunities for such translation are sorely lacking globally. As the recent reality of international cooperation has been especially dependent on market analogies, one might contest that political concepts such as coercion, legitimacy, rights and justice are helpful in mediating global duties. International cooperation has, however, in recent decades been characterized by economic concepts such as relative gains, structured debt relief, floating currencies and capital controls, moving steadily away from structured international cooperation. Reverting back to the conceptual safe-haven of the state thus seems tempting, but arguably intellectually idle. This workshop seeks papers that explore these tensions between global principles and local duties and between local politics and global economics in a historical, analytical or normative light.

Possible questions of interest include:

•       Is it an individual citizen’s duty to address a global injustice, or the duty of her state?
•       Can citizens expect their democracy to serve their own ends or are they bound to ensure their state pursues the end of global justice?
•       Where duties are mediated through the state, to what extent are they problematically dependant on constantly eroding state structures?
•       Do citizens living in democratic states but participating in a global market incur distinct economic and political duties?
•       What is the role of taxation in mitigating the tension between political and economic duties, and between the local and the global?
•       How does private debt restructuring differ normatively from the public restructuring of debt?
•       What makes international economic sanctions just? And what justifies attaching human rights conditions to trade treaties?
•       Do societies at different stages of development/and or with different political systems require different principles of distributive justice, and if so, what would differentiated practices of justice look like and who should take them up?

In order to make a submission, please submit a 500 word abstract to
[email protected]  by May 23rd 2014.