Suchergebnisse

Asylum: Exit Australia is a first-person simulation game that puts the player in the shoes of an asylum seeker. Produced to accompany the television series Go Back to Where You Came From it seeks to make a new kind of intervention in a divisive social debate. This paper considers simulation games in terms of their ability to foster civic engagement. Locating simulation games within the broad field of popular factual media, several strands of continuity are identified, while attention is also paid to the specific characteristics of simulation games, particularly the relationship they establish between player and text. Audience responses to Asylum provide insight into the experience of play and the ways in which audiences relate this experience to the asylum seeker debate.

NGOs are currently involved in attempts to bring International Financial Institutions (IFIs) in line with international human rights law. In this paper I argue that approaches to humanizing global capitalism are not doomed by the nature of capitalism as such (as Marxists suppose). Indeed, the cultural politics in which NGOs and those sympathetic to human rights within IFIs have been engaged over the last twenty years has made some difference to the policies adopted by the World Bank. However, the geo-political structures of the IFIs and the nature of capitalist competition make it legitimate, necessary even, for sovereign states to pursue their 'comparative advantage'. The difficulties of reforming global capitalism are due to economic competition between states as much as they are to capitalism as such, and to the inadequacy of global institutions to manage it in order to make equitable economic policy for the world.

This article explores the relationship between social movements, human rights and law at different scales. I compare 'global constitutionalism' and 'subaltern cosmopolitanism' as approaches to movements, rights and law. As sociologists, we are especially well placed to address certain assumptions on which these inter-disciplinary approaches rely. I argue that assumptions about the relationship between social movements and human rights that are fundamentally normative limit our understanding of the diversity of organisational forms through which human rights are being defined, and of the complexity of multi-scalar law through which claims to justice are being made. In particular, the importance of the state and national law for institutionalising human rights norms should not be neglected by privileging either local or international law as the legitimate focus of democratic claims for justice.

This article explores the effects of the legalization of international human rights on citizens and non-citizens within states. Adopting a sociological approach to rights it becomes clear that, even in Europe, the cosmopolitanization of law is not necessarily resulting in greater equality and justice. In fact, 'actually existing' cosmopolitan citizenship is characterized by a proliferation of status groups that concretize new forms of inequality, including those of super-citizens, marginal citizens, quasi-citizens, sub-citizens and un-citizens. Far from inaugurating a new era of genuinely universal human rights, in some cases cosmopolitan law may even contribute to the creation of conditions in which fundamental human rights are violated.

This article explores the Pinochet case, widely heralded as a landmark, as a case of 'intermestic' human rights that raises difficult normative and empirical questions concerning cosmopolitan justice. The article is a contribution to the sociology of human rights from the perspective of methodological cosmopolitanism, developing conceptual tools and methods to study how cosmopolitanising state institutions and cultural norms are inter-related. The argument is made that in order to understand issues of cosmopolitan justice, sociologists must give more consideration to political culture.

Sociological theories of cosmopolitanism address its development at different geographical scales, raising questions of the global demos and the global political community. This article considers international human rights as a resource for building global solidarity, and argues that the way in which international human rights are made and enforced primarily by national states must be taken seriously if they are to be considered as such. "Ethical cosmopolitanism" (Benhabib 2002) must be forged among the citizens of national territories for global social democracy to be a real possibility. The concepts of political culture and cultural politics are discussed as valuable for thinking through the relationship between ethical cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitan democracy and there is preliminary investigation of three different types of "jurisgenerative politics," considered as sites of cultural politics rather than – as Benhabib does – as contributing directly to ethical cosmopolitanism.

Considering cosmopolitanism in neo-Kantian terms of human rights, the potential for creating a cosmopolitan political community is investigated. In terms of emotions, it is suggested that the characterization of nationalism as "hot" & cosmopolitanism as "cool" is an oversimplification. The social construction of national feeling is described, & the relationship between national feeling & "humanist" sympathy is illustrated in an analysis of the website created to explore public opinions of the "Portrait of Grief" series run by The New York Times in response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 (2001). Human identification across national boundaries paves the way for a "popular cosmopolitanism" based on the extension of human rights & global citizenship. Ways that a "warm" cosmopolitanism is currently developing in political communities organized by Western national states are analyzed. K. Hyatt Stewart