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AbstractBesides stating that global or cosmopolitan citizenship is an incoherent concept in the absence of a global state, some critics assert that it represents a form of Western-centric moral neoimperialism. This article develops some responses to such objections through examining the efforts of Indian activists who have undertaken intensive international engagement in their struggles against caste discrimination. The National Campaign on Dalit Human Rights has sought to close domestic rights-implementation gaps for Dalits (formerly called untouchables) in part through vertical outreach to United Nations human rights bodies. This mode of outreach is shown to represent an important practice of global citizenship, and to challenge a view of South agent as primarily passive recipients of moral goods within a global citizenship frame. Further, the Dalit activists' global citizenship practice is shown to be significantly 'institutionally developmental', in that it highlights implementation gaps in the global human rights regime and can contribute to pressures for suprastate institutional transformation and development to address them. NCDHR actions are, for example, highly salient to the recently renewed dialogue on creating a World Court of Human Rights.

AbstractMany recent arguments for trans-state and global democracy would offer broad leeway on constitutionalized right standards to states, and few formal mechanisms for individuals to challenge domestic rights rejections beyond the state. Such a stance, it is shown here, tends to be rooted in implicit presumptions of domestic consensus. Challenges are offered to this and related presumptions in accounts of cosmopolitan democracy, as well as global variants of liberal nationalism and political liberalism. An alternative, primarily instrumental approach to trans-state and global democracy is detailed. It would give emphasis to ways in which formal suprastate participation, complemented by challenge mechanisms for individuals, could play a crucial role in helping to strengthen individual rights protections within states. The case for adopting such an approach is reinforced through attention to the efforts of a persistent domestic democratic minority – Dalits in India – to reach out to the global human rights regime for help in pressuring their own state to better protect rights against exclusion and subjugation.

While a number of prominent researchers have recently turned their attention to the likelihood or desirability of full world government, such an ideal has little current support in civic and popular discourse. This article seeks to identify some factors possibly reinforcing such 'globoscepticism'. After first discussing why it should not be seen as prima facie absurd to support global political integration, and noting widespread popular support in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, it turns to some findings on the sources of Euroscepticism. This phenomenon involves negative attitudes expressed by political elites and ordinary citizens towards European Union integration. Also considered are the determinants of attitudes towards international trade liberalisation. Insights from both areas can be applied to a preliminary exploration of globoscepticism. Specifically, they can enrich an analysis of domestic biases which naturally arise and are reinforced within a sovereign states system, and which tend to diminish support for comprehensive projects beyond the state. These pose challenges that must be addressed by academic advocates of full global integration, as well as advocates of still-ambitious but far less comprehensive projects of suprastate institution building.

How should the geographic boundaries of democratic participation be set? This has been a notoriously difficult theoretical question, beset by paradoxes around determining democratic participants democratically. It also is seen as increasingly important in practical terms, amid deepening interdependence between states, immigration tensions, and suprastate regional integration. Numerous recent accounts have called for extending participation beyond the state. The case is generally made on intrinsic grounds: democracy demands it. Respect for individual autonomy is said to be violated when outsiders are deeply affected by decision processes, or subject to coercion from them, without being able to participate in them. Yet, familiar problems around restrictions on the autonomy of persistent democratic minorities remain in such accounts, and they could be magnified with expanded boundaries. An alternative approach is offered here, grounded in a rights-based instrumental justification for democracy. It sees participation as foundationally – though not solely – valuable as a means of promoting and protecting fundamental rights. It recommends extending participation boundaries to reinforce protections within regional and ultimately global institutions. Democratic participation would remain crucial at all levels, not principally as an expression of autonomy but to provide checks on power and promote accountability to individuals in multilevel polities.

World government has, very recently, resumed its place as the subject of serious investigation by leading scholars in International Relations, economics and political theory. Prompted variously by global economic integration, the persistence of the nuclear weapons threat and a US hegemony that ostensibly functions as a form of world state, some empirically oriented scholars have found themselves pursuing discrete lines of inquiry to the common possibility of global political integration. The main empirical currents, especially those focused on security, have important precedents in the world state 'heyday' of 1944—50, and some are open to the kinds of critiques previously levied at such arguments. Normative arguments advocating gradual expansions of core rights through political integration may offer the most plausible and defensible route to deep global integration, but not necessarily one that will end at some comprehensive world state modelled on the nation-state.

A conception of global citizenship should not be viewed as separate from, or synonymous with, the cosmopolitan moral orientation, but as a primary component of it. Global citizenship is fundamentally concerned with individual moral requirements in the global frame. Such requirements, framed here as belonging to the category of individual cosmopolitanism, offer guidelines on right action in the context of global human community. They are complementary to the principles of moral cosmopolitanism — those to be used in assessing the justice of global institutions and practices — that have been emphasised by cosmopolitan political theorists. Considering principles of individual and moral cosmopolitanism together can help to provide greater clarity concerning individual duties in the absence of fully global institutions, as well as clarity on individual obligations of justice in relation to emerging and still-developing trans-state institutions.