Suchergebnisse

This essay examines the humanitarian design movement's efforts to address the crushing need, social precarity, and ecological frailty that define global megacities. The aims and character of the humanitarian design movement have been shaped by both the ethical demands of antiglobalization struggles and the rise of nongovernmental organizations as a principal means of social service-delivery in the Global South. The emergent humanitarian design movement offers a compelling critique of the failure of mainstream architectural and industrial design practices to address profound human suffering. Champions of humanitarian design, however, offer a technological fix (e.g., life straws, paper log houses, and hippo rollers) for problems rooted in imperial histories and neoliberal restructuring. In failing to address the dynamics of structural underdevelopment, do-good design performs the grassroots ideological work of neoliberalism by promoting market values and autoregulation. Within the humanitarian-corporate complexes, the global poor are construed as objects of elite benevolence and non-profit largesse, rather than as historical subjects possessing their own unique worldviews, interests, and notions of progress. This essay concludes by briefl y sketching an alternative approach to self-determination for the poor where technological development is grounded in egalitarian cultures of anticapitalist social movements.

This article outlines the main elements of rupture and continuity in the global political economy since the global economic crisis of 2008-2009. While the current calamity poses a more systemic challenge to neoliberal globalization than genetically similar turbulences in the semi-periphery during the 1990s, we find that evidence for its transformative significance remains mixed. Efforts to reform the distressed capitalist models in the North encounter severe resistance, and the broadened multilateralism of the G-20 is yet to provide effective global economic governance. Overall, neoliberal globalization looks set to survive, but in more heterodox and multipolar fashion. Without tighter coordination between old and emerging powers, this new synthesis is unlikely to inspire lasting solutions to pressing global problems such as an unsustainable international financial architecture and the pending environmental catastrophe, and may even fail to preserve some modest democratic and developmental gains of the recent past. Adapted from the source document.

The European Instrument for Democracy and Human Rights (EIDHR) is often considered the "jewel in the crown" of the European Union's democracy promotion. Its mandate encompasses the funding of democratizing civil society organizations and thus the facilitation of democratization "from below." It is argued here that if we apply Foucauldian governmentality tools to the analysis of the workings of the EIDHR, we can see that, despite the pluralistic rhetoric that guides it, the Instrument's objectives and management structures facilitate particular kinds of democratic visions. Neoliberal governmentality, it is argued, may be hidden deep within the expectations set for EU-funded civil society "democratizers." This has important consequences for how we understand the model of democracy that the European Union promotes and the power relations of the European Union's "locally owned" democracy promotion. Adapted from the source document.

Watching the uprisings unfold in the Middle East, as well as the opposition to them, leads me to appreciate the insights of social movement theory, which suggests that heterogeneous forces can unite in coalitions around super targets when political opportunities suddenly and serendipitously emerge. In this historic moment of change and resistance, will we see the unfolding institutional transformation of the state as it responds to a more participatory ethos, or will former regime stalwarts reconstitute themselves? Elected officials and new governance strategies will still confront serious distributional and economic challenges as states remain enmeshed in neoliberal policies. Political scientists are already studying constitutional change and debates about electoral design, party construction, and other institutional changes to democratize the polity, but we should also look to different transition models that seek to redress deep structural inequalities following decades of repression and rent seeking. Should principles of political or economic affirmative action be incorporated into new institutional designs of transitology?