Suchergebnisse

The post-Cold War project of globalization is changing the established notion of liberal democracy and local governance. The political autonomy of the liberal state is being increasingly compromised in favor of market forces and local governance more and more exposed to direct penetration by global and corporate power structures. This change has far-reaching implications for the future of democracy, particularly in the Third World. Aware of this challenge, new social movements in India, active at the grass roots of politics, are resisting global penetration of local communities, using new political spaces opened up by the retreat of the state from socioeconomic arenas. Through an inventive politics of struggle over issues concerning local communities and their empowerment, they articulate a vision of democracy as a creative political process, operative primarily at the local level. Their politics are addressed to establishing direct access and control of people over their immediate environment—economic, social, and cultural. To ensure that, they seek to transcend old dichotomies between state and society, global and local, political and social—and open up new possibilities for democracy in India.

Based on lecture. The emergence of nation states without common ethno-linguistic or ethno-religious backgrounds.

The view that SE development is a universal process, involving different time-lags for different developing countries, is no longer academically acceptable, because poverty in the Third World continues to rise. Two alternative development approaches are examined: the structuralist approach, which questions the workability & desirability of the linear model; & the normativist approach, which thinks in terms of basic human needs, alternative lifestyles, self-reliance, & ecological appropriateness. The weaknesses of these current alternative theories are: (1) their presumption of a universal alternate value system; (2) their failure to conceptualize the political processes through which an alternate system could be achieved; & (3) their amnesia about the differences between societies involved in change. It is suggested that alternative development needs to be conceptualized in terms of democratic practice, & that grass-roots movements are on the cutting edge of the process. K. Eddy