Rawls, Fraser, redistribution, recognition and The World Summit on the Information Society

The author frames an account of the 2005/6 World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) and the Working Group on Internet Governance (WGIG) in the framework of John Rawls' arguments for redistribution using the 'difference principle' and Nancy Fraser's arguments for recognition as constituents of justice. He argues that the intensity and character of debates in the WSIS/WGIG can better be understood in terms of Fraser's notion of recognition rather than Rawls' notion of redistribution. He argues that the dynamics of WSIS/WGIG can be understood in terms of conflicting recognition claims from states and civil society focused on the legitimacy of "trilateralism", including civil society, as a principle of participation in these Internet governance fora

Multistakeholderism and Internet Governance: A Gateway to Open Democracy in Latin America?

How is the momentum toward multistakeholderism in Internet governance playing out in Latin America? What broader implications does this have to open democracy in the region? In this report, Internet Policy Observatory affiliate Celia Lerman, analyzes the distinct evolution of the multistakeholder model in the context of Latin America’s democracies, which traditionally have not incorporated deliberative processes and multistakeholder participation into governance structures. Lerman asserts that this evolution can be explained by the effect of external events rather than by internal driving forces, concluding that this policy evolution moved from the international to the regional and national due to the fact Internet policy issues only recently became a matter of perceived importance to citizens in the region. The study looks at Latin America as a whole, highlighting several national case studies and exploring in greater depth Brazil’s much earlier adoption of the multistakeholder model

Rethinking North America: Why NAFTA\u27s Laissez Faire Approach to Integration is Flawed, and What to Do about it

An essay is presented on the status of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as of July 2011, focusing on the strong support shown to the international law by European countries as compared to the U.S., as well as the role of regional trade agreements such as NAFTA in furthering the globalization movement. John F. Murphy\u27s book The United States and the Rule of Law in International Affairs is also mentioned

The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and strategies to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the LIO’s core foundational principles, and principal underpinning “theory” (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist, and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist, and imperial, and embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in American foreign policy establishment institutions seeking to incorporate emerging powers’ elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership, and the role of the UN in Korea, 1945-53, which served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and the role of several US-state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalists’ claims, and those implied by the work on “ultra-imperialism” by Karl Kautsky and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation – by a combination of coercion, attraction, and socialisation – is the principal goal of the US-led order, not embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen

Japan's response to China's rise : regional engagement, global containment, dangers of collision

Japan and China's ability to manage their bilateral relationship is crucial for the stability of the East Asian region. It also has a global impact on the security and economic development of other regions. For just as China's rise has inevitably involved an expansion of its global reach, so Japan's responses to the challenges posed by China have increasingly taken a global form, seeking to incorporate new partners and frameworks outside East Asia. Japan's preferred response to China's regional and global rise in the post-Cold War period has remained one of default engagement. Japan is intent on promoting China's external engagement with the East Asia region and its internal domestic reform, through upgrading extant bilateral and Japan-China-US trilateral frameworks for dialogue and cooperation, and by emphasizing the importance of economic power to influence China. Japan is deliberately seeking to proliferate regional frameworks for cooperation in East Asia in order to dilute, constrain and ultimately engage China's rising power. However, Japan's engagement strategy also contains the potential to tilt towards default containment. Japan's domestic political basis for engagement is becoming increasingly precarious as China's rise stimulates Japanese revisionism and nationalism. Japan also appears increasingly to be looking to contain China on a global scale by forging new strategic links in Russia and Central Asia, with a `concert of democracies' involving India, Australia and the US, by competing for resources with China in Africa and the Middle East, and by attempting to articulate a values-based diplomacy to check the so-called `Beijing consensus'. Nevertheless, Japan's perceived inability to channel China's rise either through regional engagement or through global containment carries a further risk of pushing Japan to resort to the strengthening of its military power in an attempt to guarantee its essential national interests. It is in this instance that Japan and China run the danger of a military collision

Canada’s Visa Requirement for Mexicans And Its Political Rationalities

ResumenEn julio de 2009, el gobierno de Harper impuso un requisito de visa para todos los mexicanos que viajen a Canadá. El gobierno canadiense legitimó esta decisión tomando como pretexto el número creciente de solicitudes de asilo provenientes de mexicanos. Este artículo examina la retórica usada por los políticos conservadores para justificar el requisito exigido a los mexicanos y las leyes de reforma a la inmigración y de refugiados. Aquí se sostiene que la imposición de la visa intenta detener el número de solicitantes de asilo que provienen de México, a la vez que los criminaliza utilizando una retórica oficial y un lenguaje prejuicioso. Este discurso implica la negación bilateral de la crisis de derechos humanos creada por la narcoviolencia y la corrupción.AbstractIn July 2009, the Harper government imposed a visa requirement on all Mexicans traveling to Canada. The Canadian government legitimized its decision by alluding to the rising number of requests for refugee status from Mexico. This article examines the oficial rhetoric used by Conservative politicians to rationalize this requirement and immigration and refugee law reform. I argue that the imposition of the visa intended to stop refugee claimants from Mexico also serves to criminalize them using oficial rhetoric and prejudicial language. That discourse implies the bilateral denial of the human rights crisis created by narco-violence and corruption

New Powers and the Distribution of Preferences in Global Trade Governance: From Deadlock and Drift to Fragmentation

Existing theories make divergent predictions about the impact of new powers on the global political economy. Some argue that a more even distribution of power will erode international cooperation, while others argue that cooperation can continue with the help of international institutions to overcome collective action problems. We argue that this debate overlooks a critical determinant of the shape of power transitions: the distribution of preferences amongst the major powers. It is primarily in the context of divergent preferences that power transitions are likely to give rise to conflict. Moreover, even where preferences diverge, the gains of cooperation provide a strong incentive to continue to pursue goals through multilateralism. This situation leads to forms of institutional change unanticipated by established theories. These include 'deadlock' in expansive multilateral fora, institutional 'drift' as old rules cannot keep up with the changing political and economic context, and 'fragmentation' as countries seek minilateral solutions that reduce preference diversity. We develop this preference-based, institutional argument by examining the distribution of preferences and institutional change at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and its Doha Round, where the power transition is relatively advanced

Quasi-alliances, managing the rise of China, and domestic politics: the US-Japan-Australia trilateral 1991-2015

This thesis examines how the United States reacted to changes in its external environment in the Asia Pacific after the Cold War; in particular, this paper examines the creation of the security trilaterals in what had been a traditionally bilateral alliance system and seeks to explain this through Washington’s complex relationship with the other great power in the region, China. American policy toward China has been marked by its policy complexity, in the sense that the US has seen China both as an important trade partner and a potential peer competitor. While many scholars have covered both alliance theory and US approaches toward China, this thesis seeks to explore both together, seeking to put American strategy in the region writ-large within an overarching neoclassical realist (NCR) framework. As a result, this thesis prioritizes power and the structure of the international system, while also maintaining that external variables alone are insufficient to explain the complex behavior exhibited by the United States at this time. It therefore draws from domestic variables introduced Foreign Policy Analysis (FPA), and examines them through the NCR conceptions of ‘threat assessment’. This thesis identifies four intervening variables as crucial to understanding the evolution of US policy in the region from 1993 to 2015. These include policy-coalitions of foreign policy elites (FPEs), their perception of the structure of the international system, the domestic political conditions in which they labored, economic inter-dependency to China, and threat-assessment debates. Applying those five to the independent variable of China’s rise, this thesis argues that American foreign policy elites formed into two broad policy coalitions, who could not agree on whether to balance or to accommodate China’s rise. The quasi-nature of the trilateral, the failed attempt at a quadrilateral, and the off-and-on again nature of US-Japan-Australia alliance dynamics indicate that foreign policy elites inside all three states continue to debate China’s threat-assessmentstatus. Therefore, this thesis finds that at heart, hedging is the product of domestic variables, the inability of policy coalitions to triumph over their opposites