CIAO DATE: 11/2010
Volume: 24, Issue: 1
Spring 2010
The Politics of Punishing Terrorists [Full Text]
Anthony F. Lang, Jr.
Debates about trying and punishing terrorists reveal how the failure to construct a shared normative consensus in international criminal justice continues to bedevil the international community. The only way to achieve this consensus is to engage in the messy business of politics.
Terry MacDonald, Raffaele Marchetti
If global democratization is to advance beyond the current point, it is necessary to confront the practical challenge of institutional design: How might ideals of global democracy be put effectively into practice given the many constraints imposed by the existing global political order?
Democracy in a Pluralist Global Order: Corporate Power and Stakeholder Representation [Abstract] (PDF)
Terry MacDonald, Kate Macdonald
Whereas representative democratic mechanisms have generally been built around preexisting institutional structures of sovereign states, the global political domain lacks any firmly constitutionalized or sovereign structures that could constitute an analogous institutional backbone within a democratic global order. Instead, global public power can best be characterized as "pluralist" in structure. Some recent commentators have argued that if global democratization is to succeed at all, it must proceed along a trajectory beginning with the construction of global sovereign institutions and culminating in the establishment of representative institutions to control them. This paper challenges this view of the preconditions for global democratization, arguing that democratization can indeed proceed at a global level in the absence of sovereign structures of public power. In order to gain firmer traction on these questions, analysis focuses on the prospects for democratic control of corporate power, as constituted and exercised in one particular institutional context: sectoral supply chain systems of production and trade. It is argued that global democratization cannot be straightforwardly achieved simply by replicating familiar representative democratic institutions (based on constitutional separations of powers and electoral control) on a global scale. Rather, it is necessary to explore alternative institutional means for establishing representative democratic institutions at the global level within the present pluralist structure of global power.
Public Accountability and the Public Sphere of International Governance [Abstract] (PDF)
Jens Steffek
In much of the current literature on global and European governance, "public accountability" has come to mean accountability to national executives, to peers, to courts, and even to markets. I argue that such a re-conceptualization of "public accountability" as an umbrella term blurs a crucial dimension of the original concept: the critical scrutiny of citizens and the collective evaluation of government through public debate. In this article I critically discuss the advance of managerial and administrative notions of accountability that accompanied the steep rise of the governance concept. I advocate a return to a conception of public accountability as accountability to the wider public. I investigate the prospects for such public accountability beyond the state, which depends upon the emergence of a transnational public sphere, consisting of media and organized civil society. The function of such a transnational public sphere is to put pressure on governance institutions in case of massive maladministration, and to make sure that emergent political concerns and demands are recognized in the process of international policy making.
Deliberation and Global Criminal Justice: Juries in the International Criminal Court [Abstract] (PDF)
Eugene P. Deess, John Gastil, Colin J. Lingle
The jury system is one of the oldest deliberative democratic bodies, and it has a robust historical record spanning hundreds of years in numerous countries. As scholars and civic reformers envision a democratic global public sphere and international institutions, we advocate for the inclusion of juries of lay citizens as a means of administering justice and promoting deliberative norms. Focusing specifically on the case of the International Criminal Court, we show how juries could bolster that institution’s legitimacy by promoting public trust, increasing procedural fairness, foregrounding deliberative reasoning, and embodying democratic values. Juries would present novel logistical, philosophical, and legal problems, but we show how each of these might be overcome to make juries a viable element of global governance.
Terrorism, Resistance, and the Idea of "Unlawful Combatancy" [Full Text]
Christopher J. Finlay
When faced with security threats from terrorism and other forms of nonstate political violence, how should liberal-democratic states respond? Finlay discusses books by Tamar Meisels, Seumas Miller, and Timothy Shanahan.
The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy by Daniele Archibugi [Full Text]
Luis Cabrera
This book provides not only an exhaustive treatment of the benefits and drawbacks of cosmopolitan democracy, but also the most detailed statement to date of how some form of cosmopolitan democracy could be realized, writes reviewer Luis Cabrera.
The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days by Karen Greenberg [Full Text]
Petra Bartosiewicz
The lesson of the first 100 days of Guantanamo is not one of how truth and justice triumphed, but of how efficiently a bureaucratic machine on a war footing circumvented ethical norms and suppressed dissent, writes reviewer Petra Bartosiewicz.
War in an Age of Risk by Christopher Coker [Full Text]
Claudia Aradau
This book adds several new elements to the relation between war and the risk society. They are anxiety, complexity, and the future, writes reviewer Claudia Aradau.
This section contains a round-up of recent notable books in the field of international affairs.