Patrick Hayden

Critical Theories of Globalization

Critical Theories of Globalization is a highly accessible text that provides a comprehensive overview of globalization and its consequences. Exploring the insights of a wide range of critical theorists, this book provides an introduction to globalization from the perspective of social and political critical theory. Clearly organized around thematic chapters designed to provoke student inquiry, the book demonstrates how the views of critical theorists are crucial to understanding the global processes shaping the world today.

The human right to health and the struggle for recognition

Persistent health inequalities exist globally, affecting high-income countries and blighting the developing world. Health inequalities currently are one of the greatest challenges facing realisation of the human right to health. This article argues that the struggle for the right to health in the face of such inequalities requires embracing three critical considerations: redistribution, representation, and recognition. While the analysis of the right to health has been formulated predominantly around theories of distributive justice, I suggest that a more normatively compelling account will link the politics of economic redistribution to the politics of sociocultural recognition. A recognition approach, which views rights claims as grounded on the vulnerability of the human condition, can show how rights are emergent in political action and that the ability to claim and exercise the human right to health is contingent upon recognition of diverse sociopolitical statuses. From this perspective, there are no ‘neutral’ constructions of the rights-bearing subject and conflict between different political framings of the right to health is a consequence of the struggle for recognition. This theme is illustrated by comparing conservative, affirmative, and transformative processes of recognition in the struggle for access to essential antiretroviral medicines by South Africas Treatment Action Campaign.

From Political Friendship to Befriending the World

Abstract Political friendship is typically portrayed as a dyadic relationship. In this traditional model, friendship is conceived as a positive intersubjective experience of relation-to-self and relation-to-other, assuming the reciprocity and equality characteristic of symmetrical relations of recognition. This essay explores an alternative, triadic model of political friendship, suggested by the work of Hannah Arendt. Arendt makes the claim, at odds with most modern accounts, that “politics is not so much about human beings as it is about the world that comes into being between them and endures beyond them.” I suggest that the dyadic model of political friendship is incomplete; a more adequate paradigm would foreground triadic relations of interest, concern and care for the phenomenal world itself, conceived as the quasi-objective intermediary of human artifice. As a “public thing,” a shared world is a necessary condition for intersubjective friendship and therefore is deserving of a properly political mode of acknowledgement and friendship in its own right.

Introduction: Reflections on the Demise and Renewal of Utopia in a Global Age

How should human communities — and ultimately, perhaps, the community of humanity — be created anew, in the sense of ‘anticipating’ and imagining ‘that which does not yet exist’ (Deleuze, 1994, p. 147)? This question lies at the heart of utopianism. To be utopian, we suggest, is the stuff of politics, and it first involves subjecting the politics of the present to critique. Secondly, it involves imagining human communities that do not yet exist and, thirdly, it involves thinking and acting so as to prevent the foreclosure of political possibilities in the present and future. The perspective adopted in this book is that the question of how to anticipate and imagine communities that ‘do not yet exist’ animates many critical socio-political engagements with contemporary globalization.

Security Beyond the State: Cosmopolitanism, Peace and the Role of Just War Theory

The lessons learnt from international politics in the post-Cold War era and the nature of global conflict today compel us to accept an important fact: it is impossible to protect and enhance human freedom and well-being exclusively through the traditional paradigm of state security. The security of the individual human being must also be taken into consideration. Political theory and practice must come to accept this global reality, since all too often the best laid plans for achieving state security have come at the cost of an increase in human suffering, fear and deprivation. What is required is a new global outlook: a cosmopolitan approach that recognises the highly interdependent nature of human life across political and territorial boundaries and the growing irrelevance of the traditional conception of state sovereignty as an end in itself. This new global outlook may be best represented by the human security paradigm. For cosmopolitans as well as for human security advocates, the traditional realist claims to sovereignty and non-intervention on the part of states are being supplanted in international relations by a norm of humanitarian assistance driven by the human rights and security interests of individuals.1 According to cosmopolitanism, state sovereignty in itself provides no reason not to intervene when necessary, for example, to prevent humanitarian disasters and gross human rights violations.

Globalization, Reflexive Utopianism, and the Cosmopolitan Social Imaginary

Utopia and globalization are intrinsically linked. The classical definition of utopia considers it to be both no place (outopia) and good place (eutopia) (Kumar, 1991, p. 1). But utopia is more than an alternative society. More importantly, as Ernst Bloch recognized, utopia conveys a powerful impulse or drive that is simultaneously critical of present sociopolitical realities and anticipatory of positive alternative futures. It is a basic human aspiration, the longing and hope for a better world that, although emerging out of the historical past and present, is not yet (Bloch, 1986). While the term ‘utopia’ originated in the West — coined by Sir Thomas More with his combination of the two Greek words — it subsequently has been dispersed throughout the world by means of a manifold of social, political, economic, and cultural interactions on a global scale. It is notable that More’s vision of utopia is presented through a tale of world exploration in which the traveller-narrator, Raphael Hythloday, discovers unknown (from a European perspective) lands, seeks out new peoples, and brings the Old World into contact with the New World (More, 1965). Utopia thus connotes the desire to transgress borders and to encounter other lands and peoples, to connect together otherwise disparate places and identities across the globe. In this way utopia and globalization are born together.

Theorizing Globalization: Introducing the Challenge

The purpose of this chapter is to provide critical tools for, and background to, the chapters ahead. Part of this involves examining globalization’s historical dimension, which is vital in thinking about the specificity of the contemporary globalizing moment. In theoretical terms, we want to argue for the utility of critical theory as a way of approaching globalization, and critical theories of social change and analyses of modernity and development, which are linked in a number of crucial ways to discussions of globalization, are helpful in understanding the complexity of globalizing transformations. Above all, we insist on the inescapability of theorizing, and maintain that the imaginative and lively variety of critical theoretical approaches canvassed here shed significant light on globalization.

Repudiating Inhumanity: Cosmopolitan Justice and the Obligation to Prosecute Human Rights Atrocities

This chapter’s departure point is the moral justification for the claim that all persons, and by extension our political societies, have an obligation to contest the impunity that historically has protected perpetrators of genocide and crimes against humanity. Prominent recent examples of gross injustice in the forms of genocide and crimes against humanity include the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. Between 1991 and 1999, civil war, ethnic cleansing, and other human rights abuses tore apart the republics of the former Yugoslavia. Brutal fighting and repression—including violent expulsion, group rape, and mass murder—resulted in the deaths of more than 250,000 people.1 In Rwanda, approximately 800,000 people were systematically slaughtered over a 100-day period between April and July 1994. The genocide was carried out by state security forces and armed militias, most notoriously the Interhamwe (“those who attack together”) and Impuzamugambi (“the single-minded ones”). Most of the victims belonged to the minority Tutsi population, but Hutu moderates were targeted as well.2

Confronting Globalization in the Twenty-first Century: An Introduction

The literature on globalization is truly prodigious and wide-ranging. The process, after all, encompasses a plurality of phenomena. Consider, for instance, the following: the US

Rebellion and an Ethics of Measure

1.5 trillion turned over per day in foreign exchange; the size and power of many large multinational corporations; the new technologies such as the Internet which spell the ‘death of distance’,1 recomposing communities and identity and providing the possibility of a new public sphere; the emergence of a new system of global governance, with local bodies, non-governmental organizations, multinational corporations, transnational global bodies and treaties reconfiguring the nature of rule, and perhaps making the state more of a ‘strategic actor’2 rather than a prime political mover; a new polarization of wealth, with the three richest people in the world controlling more assets than the 600 million people in the 48 less developed countries; the development of a new international division of labour, and the transformation of work, with its personal and social consequences;3 the spread of Western cultural products so that ‘America is everybody’s second culture’; the emergence of a global environmental commons in the face of a host of threatening ecological catastrophes;4 and the much talked of global scission between McWorld, on the one hand, and Jihad, on the other.