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José Martí, revered as an inspirational figure in the struggle for Cuban independence, lived most of his short but remarkable life in exile. Driven from the shores of colonial Cuba at the age of seventeen, Martí spent the next two decades formulating ideas about what a liberated Cuba might be like by traveling to, residing in, and writing about other countries that had thrown off the imperial yoke. While Mexico and the United States are recognized as having played key roles in Martí's intellectual development, little attention has been paid to Guatemala, where he taught school and mixed in elite circles in 1877 and 1878. This essay examines Martí's experiences in Guatemala and discusses how his time there, by exposing him to the liberal agenda of General Justo Rufino Barrios, furnished him with a concrete example of nation building that Martí not only admired but also was moved to champion. (Cuba Stud/GIGA)

The normative literature on secession has widely addressed the question of under which conditions the secession of a particular territory from a larger state might be regarded as justifiable. The idea of a normative justification of secession, however, remains ambiguous unless one distinguishes between the justice of secession and its legitimacy, a distinction that is now widely accepted in political philosophy. Much of the literature seems to have focused on the question about justice, while, in comparison, very little attention has been paid to the question of under which conditions secession can be regarded as democratically legitimate, as something explicitly different to the question of justice. This article addresses this second question. After some preliminary remarks, the article focuses on the main obstacle to develop a theory of democratic legitimacy of secessions, the so-called "demos problem." Such problem, it is argued, has no categorical solution. This does not imply, however, that there is no democratic, legitimate way of redrawing our borders. Two strategies are proposed in this article to overcome the difficulty posed by the demos problem: an ideal strategy of consensus building and a non-ideal strategy of decision-making in the circumstances of disagreement.

Este texto se pregunta si en el escenario global actual se dan las circunstancias de la política, esto es, las condiciones adecuadas para que emerja una verdadera política global, condición a su vez necesaria para la existencia de instituciones globales autoritativas. Tras examinar las ideas de circunstancias de la justicia y de circunstancias de la política, y tras proponer una noción de bien común global, el trabajo constata efectivamente la existencia de bienes comunes globales, así como de problemas vinculados a dichos bienes que aconsejan un esquema de decisión y acción conjuntas a nivel global. También constata la existencia de conflictos inevitables y de desacuerdos acerca de cómo deben ser dichas decisiones y acciones comunes. Todo ello nos sitúa, en efecto, en las circunstancias de la política global