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Document Details :

Title: In Place of 'Global Democracy'
Author(s): SAWARD, Michael
Journal: Ethical Perspectives
Volume: 15    Issue: 4   Date: December 2008   
Pages: 507-526
DOI: 10.2143/EP.15.4.2034394

Abstract :
In the present contribution, I discuss something that is not ‘global democracy’. Global democracy is too facile a name for something, the shape of which (as if it could have a single shape) remains unknowable. I begin by sketching key reasons for caution about invocations of ‘global democracy’. Laslett was right to say we need to think more about political forms – where do transnational forms come from, how do they crystallise and become formalised? Are new procedures ‘designed’, or do they emerge from what a range of institutions and actors do and create? I move on to look at the unavoidable particularity of invocations of global democracy, in terms of varying narratives and emphases. I then sketch an alternative, reflexive and focused way to think about democratic practices in transnational spaces.

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