Garrett Wallace Brown

The Idea of Partnership within the Millennium Development Goals: context, instrumentality and the normative demands of partnership

Abstract The word’ partnership’ is pervasive within debates about participatory global governance and the idea of partnership acts as an underwriting principle within both the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) and the Paris Declaration. However, there remains general ambiguity about the meaning of the idea of partnership and how its conceptualisation is meant to normatively guide a more co-ordinated move from theory to practice. Indeed, the idea of partnership remains an impoverished theoretical and practical appeal, which is under-defined, poorly scrutinised and unconvincingly utilised as a normative tool in applied practice. This article will provide a more theoretical examination of what an appeal to ideas of partnership means and explore what a normative commitment to a robust conceptualisation of partnership might look like within the MDGs. To do so, it will examine the underwriting normative language of partnership as it is found within the MDGs, theoretically explore the principles inherent within this normative language, and locate present gaps within the MDGs between its normative theory and applied practice. By doing so, it will be possible to outline some additional principles and commitments that are normatively required to satisfy the underwriting spirit of the MDGs in order to bring them in line with said spirits own normative values.

Grounding cosmopolitanism : from Kant to the idea of a cosmopolitan constitution

Part One 1. Kantian Cosmopolitanism 2. Kantian Cosmopolitan Law and the Idea of a Cosmopolitan Constitution Part Two 3. State Sovereignty, Federation and Kantian Cosmopolitanism 4. Cultural Difference and Kantian Cosmopolitanism 5. Kantian Distributive Justice and the Capability for Effective Autonomy 6. Conclusion: Applied Theory and a Continued Cosmopolitan Enthusiasm.

Bringing the State Back into Cosmopolitanism: The Idea of Responsible Cosmopolitan States

When surveying the cosmopolitan literature one is often struck by the ease with which the state is rendered morally and empirically otiose and by resulting ambiguities about the role states could play in creating a cosmopolitan condition. In response to these ambiguities, the purpose of this article is to examine some recent cosmopolitan arguments and to see what answers, if any, they have for bridging the gap between cosmopolitan theory and state practice. By doing so, this article will map out the recent relationship between cosmopolitanism and the state while also suggesting that cosmopolitans should reconsider a research agenda based on the idea of responsible cosmopolitan states as a means to create stronger links between cosmopolitan theory and contemporary international practice.

Globalization is What We Make of It: Contemporary Globalization Theory and the Future Construction of Global Interconnection

There are four perennial questions that preoccupy globalization theory. For those who write about globalization, there is a constant attempt to discover what globalization is, when it may have started, what benefits and burdens it offers for global cohabitation and whether globalization is ultimately a good thing or a bad thing. The purpose of this article is to review several new works in contemporary globalization theory and to assess what new answers they offer to these questions. Through this examination it will be argued that although these recent works provide significant improvements to former discussions on globalization, they still tend to lack an obvious insight. Namely, they fail to highlight fully the fact that whatever globalization is, it is as important to think normatively about directing its future as it is to understand its past. In other words, globalization is entirely what we make of it, both in how we cognitively come to understand it, but also in how we decide to shape its future.

Safeguarding deliberative global governance: the case of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria

It is often argued that multilateralism is no longer an effective mechanism to respond to global priorities and that more deliberative and multisectoral governance is needed. To explore this, the purpose of this article is to examine the practice of mutlisectoral deliberation within the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria and to determine whether it has resulted in providing a more deliberative response to global health priorities. To do so, this article will apply various theoretical arguments for deliberative democracy to the results of a four year study on the multisectoral organisation the Global Fund. By making links between theory and practice, the article will argue that the multisectoralism practiced by the Global Fund continues to suffer from a deliberative deficit and that it has not safeguarded equal stakeholder participation, equal deliberation between stakeholders or alleviate the asymmetric power relationships which are representative of current forms of multilateral governance. Nevertheless, by locating these gaps between theory and practice, it is possible to outline deliberative safeguards that might, if constitutionally enhanced, pull the Global Fund closer to its own normative values of multisectoral deliberative decision-making.

State Sovereignty, Federation and Kantian Cosmopolitanism

This article examines the role of states in Kantian cosmopolitanism and seeks to clarify the relationship between the rights of states and the concept of cosmopolitan law. The argument is made that states play an important role within Kantian theory, but that the concept of absolute sovereignty is also ultimately rejected. The article examines the Kantian argument for domestic right, international right and cosmopolitan right, and provides an alternative view of these conceptions against the argument that Kantianism involves the removal of states and the creation of an overarching global government. It establishes that Kantian cosmopolitanism provides a normative ethical global order without the existence of a world government. From this discussion, the relevance of Kantian cosmopolitanism is also examined in relation to contemporary International Relations theory.

The Laws of Hospitality, Asylum Seekers and Cosmopolitan Right A Kantian Response to Jacques Derrida

The purpose of this article is to respond to Jacques Derrida’s reading of Immanuel Kant’s laws of hospitality and to offer a deeper exploration into Kant’s separation of a cosmopolitan right to visit ( Besuchsrecht) and the idea of a universal right to reside ( Gastrecht). Through this discussion, the various laws of hospitality will be examined, extrapolated and outlined, particularly in response to the tensions articulated by Derrida. By doing so, this article will offer a reinterpretation of the laws of hospitality, arguing that hospitality is not meant to capture all the conditions necessary for cosmopolitan citizenship or for a thoroughgoing condition of cosmopolitan justice as Derrida assumes. This is because hospitality could be understood as the basic normative requirement necessary to establish an ethical condition for intersubjective communication at the global level, where discursive communication regarding the substance of a future condition of cosmopolitan justice is to be subjected to global public reason.

Globalization and its methodological discontents: Contextualizing globalization through the study of HIV/AIDS.

There remains considerable discontent between globalization scholars about how to conceptualize its meaning and in regards to epistemological and methodological questions concerning how we can come to understand how these processes ultimately operate, intersect and transform our lives. This article argues that to better understand what globalization is and how it affects issues such as global health, we must take a differentiating approach, which focuses on how the multiple processes of globalization are encountered and informed by different social groups and with how these encounters are experienced within particular contexts. The article examines the heuristic properties of qualitative field research as a means to help better understand how the intersections of globalization are manifested within particular locations. To do so, the article focuses on three recent case studies conducted on globalization and HIV/AIDS and explores how these cases can help us to understand the contextual permutations involved within the processes of globalization.

The constitutionalization of what

There are difficult global challenges that need to be addressed. In response, many have argued for the increased constitutionalization of international law. An argument is often also made that the international order is already constitutionalized in some meaningful sense and that there are founding conditions within the international order that represent something like a global constitution. Nevertheless, when surveying the literature on constitutionalization one is often struck by a general ambiguity about what the term means and with how constitutionalization is meant to operate between theory and institutional practice. In particular, there seems to be an overall ambiguity regarding what is being constituted by the processes of constitutionalization, about how these processes operate, and with whether this legal order is in fact creating the type of progressive cosmopolitanism that is often assumed. To address these ambiguities, this article will seek to better understand what appeals to constitutionalization generally mean and to expose key conceptual problems. The goal in doing so is to highlight areas that need greater conceptual attention and to recommend potential solutions, so that more cosmopolitan minded scholars can feel more confident in prescribing constitutionalization as part of their normative catalogue.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria: Expertise, Accountability, and the Depoliticisation of Global Health Governance

During his tenure as the Executive Director of the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria (hereafter the Global Fund), Richard Feachem argued that the autonomous, multisectoral, and technically focused design of the Global Fund is ‘really insulated … from the political dynamic, which inevitably and appropriately permeates the UN. We are a very apolitical organization … we’ve been able to take principled and technical decisions … because we’re not subject to the political influences that would come to bear in the UN’ (Feachem, 2005). This is a notable quote, for it not only draws attention to the potential apolitical merits of the multisectoral Global Fund but also criticises the ‘politicisation’ of multilateral forms of global health governance. Charges of politicisation have been levelled at the UN throughout much of the organisation’s history, and there are two commonly cited examples from the arena of global health. First, it is common practice for wealthy nations to withhold financial contributions to bodies such as the WHO and UNICEF in order to manipulate policy priorities for their own interests (Brown et al., 2006; Godlee, 1994; Walt, 1993; Walt and Buse, 2006). Secondly, there is a history of competition and conflict between the multilateral health agencies over their relative authority, influence, and leadership in global health (Brown et al., 2006, pp. 67–68; Walt, 1993; Walt and Buse, 2006, pp. 661–664). Though a contested concept, the term ‘politicisation’ implies a pejorative influence of politics (Siddiqi, 1995, pp. 30–34) through which power and wealth has corrupted and colonised decision-making, thus leaving a multilateral system of governance that is unrepresentative of the global community; inefficient and ineffective in responding to collective action problems; and also lacking in both credibility and legitimacy (Brown, 2010; Ghebali, 1985).