Cosmopolitanism

Starting from Edgar Allan Poe’s assertion that there is no such thing as a
long poem, several modernist poets discovered the lyrical potential of a new poetical
form in which extension is possible if one follows an analogous principal to that
in music: base the poem not on narration, but on a concert of images or emotions
that pursue a new language, a language we could say begins with Mallarmé and
resolves itself in modern poems of very diverse natures, such as T. S. Eliot’s The Waste
Land and Four Quartets, and Ode marítima by Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym Álvaro
de Campos.
The purpose of this reflection is to compare the way Eliot and Pessoa, representing
differing contemporary literary traditions, created, each in his own way, the
modernist long poem. The result, I hope, may enhance our understanding of this
poetic manifestation, not as a national but as a cosmopolitan phenomenon, which
may explain its success throughout the last century.
keywords: Álvaro de Campos, T. S. Eliot, Modernist Long Poem

The dislocated, deterritorialized discourse produced by repatriates from formerly European colonies has remained overlooked in academic scholarship. One such group is the Eurasian “Indo” community that has its roots in the former Dutch East Indies, today’s Indonesia. This article focuses on Tjalie Robinson, the intellectual leader of this community from the 1950s to the mid-1970s. The son of a Dutch father and a British-Javanese mother, Robinson became the leading voice of the diasporic Indo community in the Netherlands and later also in the United States. His engagement resulted in the foundation of the Indo magazine Tong Tong and the annual Pasar Malam Besar, what was to become the world’s biggest Eurasian festival. Robinson played an essential role in the cultural awareness and self-pride of the eventually global Indo community through his elaboration of a hybrid and transnational identity concept. By placing his focus “tussen twee werelden” (in-between two worlds) and identifying “mixties-schap” (mestizaje) as the essential characteristic of Indo identity, Robinson anticipated debates on hybridity, transnationalism, and creolism that only much later would draw attention from scholars in the field of postcolonial studies. This article highlights Robinson’s pioneering role in framing a deterritorialized hybrid alternative to nationalist essentialism in the postcolonial era.

We live in a globalized world in which a person in Burkina Faso can identify with Star Wars heroes, and in which a New York trader drinks the same Starbucks coffee as his Taiwanese counterpart. How are individuals socialized in Rome, Bombay, and Tokyo? To answer this question, a unique investigation has been carried out using two scales of analysis usually tackled separately by global studies: the scale of the cosmopolitan world and its global narratives, imaginaries, iconographies; as well as the scale of everyday life and socialization to otherness. This two-fold perspective constitutes the innovative approach of this volume that endeavors to address an operationalization of the cosmopolitan perspective and reacts to current debates and new research findings.
This book was first published in 2016 as Pluriel et commun. Sociologie d’un monde cosmopolite by Les Presses de Sciences Po.
Vincenzo Cicchelli is Associate Professor of Sociology at Université Paris Descartes and Research Fellow at GEMASS, Université Paris Sorbonne/CNRS. At Brill, he is the co-editorin-chief of Youth and Globalization (with Sylvie Octobre), the series co-editor of Youth in a Globalizing World (with Sylvie Octobre), and the series co-editor of Doing Global Studies (with Stéphane Dufoix). He has published (with Sylvie Octobre) Aesthetico-Cultural Cosmopolitanism and French Youth. The Taste of the World (Palgrave, 2018).

“Vincenzo Cicchelli has written a new and much needed book. He explores people’s experiences of a shared and plural world, and the tangible, ordinary mechanisms of global society that are shaping the cultural imaginaries and the lives of individuals today. Plural and Shared is a major contribution to understanding the cultural shifts of our time and how cosmopolitanism may be understood in this context.”
– David Held, Professor of Sociology, Durham University

“Timely and important, […] a well-written and meticulously researched monograph that stands as a major contribution to the growing body of literature on cosmopolitanism. It is a ‘must read’ for anyone wanting to understand the historic and modern forces shaping our increasingly globalizing and cosmopolitan world.”
– Elijah Anderson, Professor of Sociology, Yale University

“Cicchelli has written a thought-provoking book about an important and timely topic: how can we come to terms with the cosmopolitan world, which we share but which is inherently plural, composed of different cultures and outlooks on life? To address that conundrum, the book lays foundations for a cosmopolitan sociology and shows how it can be applied to examining the cultural, subjective and experiential dimensions of global society. It is a must read for all interested in global studies and cosmopolitanism.”
– Pertti Alasuutari, Professor of Sociology, University of Tampere

Celestial Bodies, winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2019, signals the transitory nature of a singular world as the narrative displaces the characters between national territories like Oman, Egypt, and Canada and stresses the futility of emplacement within an absolute geographical signifier or language, even as their interpersonal relations struggle to hold on to the normalcy defined by tradition. The novel, originally written in Arabic and translated into English by Alharthi's PhD supervisor Marilyn Booth, co-winner of the prize, demonstrates the politics inherent in being housed in the English language. The paper argues that the problematization of the genre of the novel and the questioning of the efficacy of linguistic self-location within source and target languages allows for larger negotiations with issues of literary cosmopolitanism and the characterizations of the spatial signifier of the world. The expansion of the cultural and political identity of the Omanis, arising from a conflicted assimilation of modern European values, leads to changes in the form of the novel that attempts to hold on to its Arabic roots while rethinking the structure of the genre itself. The trope of forgetting, of both national and individual pasts and presents, is motivated in the novel to qualify a cosmopolitanism that acknowledges these very incommunicable gaps between national histories.

Submitted Dialogics Journal, October 2021

This doctoral dissertation investigates the development of the norm of sovereignty as responsibility by focusing on its institutionalization in the framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Prominent observers have regarded the emergence of a new norm of sovereignty as responsibility as one of the most significant normative shifts in international society since the aftermath of World War II. Against this backdrop, accounts have proliferated situating the ICC at the cutting edge of normative change. The present study critically engages with the whole set of theoretical foundations underlying this view, including the conventional constructivist understanding of norm development upon which the latter is premised. This, on the one hand, emphasizes the importance of norm institutionalization within “tangible” sets of rules or organizations. On the other, it understands institutionalization itself as a moment of clarity and stabilization, thus largely reducing it to an end-point of the norm emergence process. In other words, norm institutionalization is confined to a positivist view in which institutions fall back to the role of neutral fora. The result is a linear, static, and largely depoliticized account of norm content, which, while yielding to the traditional lack of communication between normative and empirical studies, ends up reiterating a dichotomic and simplistic view in which norms are scripts of emancipation, and power a practice of domination. The dissertation aims to unravel this dilemma altogether by offering a step forward in the development of a post-positivist constructivist approach. In other words, it takes a genuinely trans-disciplinary perspective and delves into the configuration of normativity as part of institutional practice, paying special attention to how the relative power of relevant actors reconstitutes norms during norm negotiation and implementation. Hence, the study  unfolds from an unusual location – at the intersection between normative international theory and the politics of international criminal law; and from there, it seeks to revive discussions about the power-laden nature of the normative fabric of international society, its own dis-symmetries, and its outright hierarchies. To this end, the dissertation asks two major sequential questions: how the overarching system negotiated by states at the Rome Conference affects the selection of situations and cases before the ICC and their outcomes; and how the selection of situations and cases and their outcomes, in turn, “feeds back” to the norm of sovereignty institutionalized through the Court’s practice. The resulting analysis shows the following. While the Rome Statute reflects the persistence of the state as the primary site of political authority and coercion, it also cuts against the normative aspirations of sovereignty as responsibility by leaving the Court specifically ill-equipped to break with a notorious pattern of hyper-protected sovereignty. Outstanding issues such as the ICC’s selectivity and African bias, as well as the Court’s future prospects, are then reconsidered under this light. Those findings are then discussed in the final part of the study. Focusing on questions of delegation to international institutions, this ends with a note of caution. It concludes that the prospects of sovereignty as responsibility, as well as the broader discussion about cosmopolitan governance, lie more with the re-politicization of the debate than a straightforward invocation of greater forms of supranationalism.

Baha’u’llah’s Bishārāt (Glad-Tidings):
A Proclamation to Scholars and Statesmen
Christopher Buck and Youli A. Ioannesyan
Baha’i Studies Review 16 (2010): 3–28.

This article is a historical and textual study of the one of the major writings of Baha’u’llah: the Lawḥ-i Bishārāt (‘Tablet of Glad-Tidings’), revealed circa 1891, and advances new theories as to its provenance and purpose. The ‘Tablet of Glad-Tidings’ is a selective compendium of Baha’u’llah’s laws and principles, sequentially presented in a series of fifteen ‘Glad-Tidings.’ As the Arabic term, bishārāt, suggests, these ‘Glad-Tidings’ were a public announcement of some of the essential teachings of the new Baha’i religion. The ‘Glad-Tidings’ is the most extensive of several ‘Tablets’ by Baha’u’llah that present key teachings in a numbered structure. The Glad-Tidings may, in part, be regarded as serially articulated ‘world reforms’ intermixed with religious reforms emanating from Baha’u’llah in his professed role as ‘World Reformer.’ The ‘Glad-Tidings’ also functioned analogously (albeit anachronistically) to a press release, serving not only as a public proclamation, but to rectify the inaccuracies and gross misrepresentations that had previously circulated in print. Intended for widespread translation and publication, the Glad-Tidings was sent to scholars — notably Russian orientalist, Baron Viktor Rosen (1849–1908) and Cambridge Orientalist, Edward Granville Browne (1862–1926) — and possibly pre-revolutionary Russian statesmen as well. As a ‘Proclamatory Aqdas,’ the Tablet of Glad-Tidings was part of a much broader proclamation by Baha’u’llah, who proclaimed his mission to the political and religious leaders of the world. This study will argue that the Baha’u’llah may have revealed the Tablet of Glad-Tidings for E.G. Browne — or rather through him, since Baha’u’llah evidently intended that Browne should translate and publish the Bishārāt in order to make the nature of the Baha'i teachings more widely known. This would then correct the distortions that had previously been published regarding Baha’u’llah's purpose and the nature of the religion that he founded, thereby, promoting a public awareness that a new world religion was on the horizon of modernity.

Borderlands 2016 Table of Contents and Introduction

The images of migrants and refugees arriving in precarious boats on the shores of southern Europe, and of the makeshift camps that have sprung up in Lesbos, Lampedusa, Calais and elsewhere, have become familiar sights on television screens around the world.  But what do we know about the border places – these liminal zones between countries and continents – that have become the focus of so much attention and anxiety today?  What do we know about the individuals who fill these places, their hopes and fears, and about the kinds of social relationships that form between the groups of people who confront one another there – the migrants and refugees, the local residents, the police and other officials of the state? 

In this timely book, anthropologist Michel Agier addresses these questions and examines the character of the borderlands that emerge on the margins of nation-states. Drawing on his ethnographic fieldwork, he shows that borders, far from disappearing, have acquired a new kind of centrality in our societies, becoming reference points for the growing numbers of people who do not find a place in the countries they wish to reach. They have become the site for a new kind of  subject, the border inhabitant (or) the border dweller, who is  both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, enclosed on the one hand and excluded on the other, and who is  obliged to learn, under harsh conditions, the ways of the world and of other people.  In this respect, the lives of migrants, even in the uncertainties or dangers of the borderlands, tell us something about the condition in which everyone is increasingly living today, a ‘cosmopolitan condition’ in which the experience of the unfamiliar is  more common and the relation between self and other is in constant renewal. .

This book will be of great interest to students and scholars in anthropology, sociology and politics, as well as anyone concerned with the pressing issues raised by migration today.

This article analyzes how mass-market cruise lines mobilize food, laborers, and built environments to offer passengers cosmopolitanism with the purpose of maintaining a unique business model. It is argued that while companies target a growing demand for culturally immersive dining experiences, they do not seek to offer complete immersion in any one culture but cosmopolitanism through a combination of multiple themed establishments on a mobile platform. Culinary themes are installed using labor and built environments, for instance through the placement of visual and material culture in eateries. While some onboard dining experiences are themed around the cultures of nations on the ship’s itinerary, many evoke international cultures. In studying how mass-market cruise lines as mobile spaces of containment combine both international and localized dining experiences to offer the “world on a ship,” scholars of tourism can better understand how touristic companies produce cosmopolitanism at destinations.

In the mid-20th century, the foreign-minority communities that had played a significant role in shaping the culture, institutions, and built environment of modern Alexandria were compelled to leave Egypt. In the intervening years, as Alexandria’s status was transformed from cosmopolis to regional capital, the foreign minorities, if recalled at all, were cast as compradors to colonial interests. Since the 1990s, there has been a revival of interest in Alexandria’s modern cosmopolitan past, as evidenced both in urban renovation projects and in Egyptian literature. This article aims to interpret these separate but parallel trends. The connection this article makes between these two distinct forms of narrative hinges on the trope of circulation. The renovation projects, including improvements to the circulation of traffic, reflect a marketing strategy that circulates nostalgic images or narratives of the city’s cosmopolitan past. The novel discussed in this article, Ambergris Birds by Ibrahim Abdel Meguid, is likewise a narrative of circulation concerned with recuperating Alexandria’s cosmopolitanism. In reading the two narratives against each other, this article attempts to unpack the ideological underpinnings of their recuperative gestures.

Keywords: Literature; Egypt; nostalgia; cosmopolitanism

Modern accounts of Stoic politics have attributed to Zeno the ideal of an isolated community of sages and to later Stoics such as Seneca a cosmopolitan utopia transcending all traditional States. By returning to the Cynic background to both Zeno's Republic and the Cosmopolitan tradition, this paper argues that the distance between the two is not as great as is often supposed. This account, it is argued, is more plausible than trying to offer a developmental explanation of the supposed transformation in Stoic political thought from isolated community to cosmopolitan utopia.

This collection of essays examines the relationship between the media and cosmopolitanism in an increasingly fragmented and globalizing world. This relationship is presented from multiple perspectives and the essays cover, amongst other themes, cosmopolitanization in everyday life, the mediation of suffering, trauma studies, and researching cosmopolitanism from a non-Western perspective.
Some of the essays explore existing research and theory about cosmopolitanism and apply it to specific case studies; others attempt to extend this theoretical framework and engage in a dialogue with the broader disciplines of media and cultural studies. Overall, this variety of approaches generates valuable insights into the central issue of the book: the role played by the media, in its various forms, in either encouraging or discouraging cosmopolitanist identifications among its audiences.

Cosmopolitanism requires individuals to imagine themselves not just as members of local and national groups but as part of a global and, to some degree, abstract "community" of strangers. In doing so, it raises questions about how we can communicate with and imagine others beyond the horizon of a local community or nation state. These questions cannot be separated from electronic media which provide an empirical basis for the understanding of others in a global community. In this chapter, we investigate the role of on-demand television in shaping cosmopolitan publics and argue that two contrary principles are operative. Due to its global reach, television provides the basis for a "banal" cosmopolitanism, where audience members are simply aware of others beyond immediate community and national boundaries. However, on-demand television has the potential to limit engagement and global awareness through the promotion of individually tailored practices of consumption. This narrowing of exposure to content, within the broader context of an expansion in

[Paper in Italian]
The discovery of an ancient borrowing from Arabic in the domain of religion (FAKRU, the "name" of the she-camel of prophet Saleh, derived from "FA-‘AQARU..." i.e. the starting words of the quranic verses containing this story) suggests that the oldest relations with Arabs were not limited to secular, commercial ties, but included religious instruction.

Archéologue italien, directeur du Musée Gréco-romain d’Alexandrie de 1904 à 1932, Evaristo Breccia (1876-1967) marque pour presque trois décennies cette institution muséale ainsi que la vie culturelle alexandrine, contribuant à produire une certaine image d’Alexandrie – cosmopolite et tolérante – qui a eu une si grande visibilité au XXème siècle qu’elle a fini par
s’imposer avec la force de l’évidence. En faisant oublier qu'elle a vu le jour dans une Égypte sous emprise coloniale.
Mais quel est le rôle de Breccia dans la production et la diffusion de ce topos ? Et jusqu’à quel point est-il un rôle assumé ? Cette contribution se propose d’analyser ces points sur la base des choix muséaux de Breccia, ainsi que des textes qu’il a écrits. D’un côté, ses choix muséaux, accompagnés par son travail d’archéologue sur le terrain, façonnent l’image de ce qu’il ressent comme "son" musée et et qui est à l’époque le seul musée citadin, fondé en 1892 par la Municipalité d’Alexandrie. 
De l’autre, Breccia est l’auteur d’un "Guide de la ville d’Alexandrie et de son Musée", initialement publié en 1907, qui connaît plusieurs éditions (1914, 1922) et est largement repris par E. M. Forster dans son propre guide ("Alexandria, a history and a guide", 1922), dans un fil rouge qui nous mène au "Quatuor d’Alexandrie" écrit par Lawrence Durrell entre 1957 et 1960. Le dénominateur commun entre la direction muséale et la rédaction des guides est à rechercher dans l’engagement personnel de Breccia pour la récupération et la valorisation du passé hellénistique d’Alexandrie. Cette récupération est tout sauf anodine et il serait réducteur de la lire comme un simple reflet de son travail d’archéologue. Au contraire, en la lisant à travers les catégories du « visible » et de l’« invisible », elle révèle tout son poids dans la construction d’une image d’Alexandrie viable dans la société coloniale de l’époque.

Niseko, Hokkaido, a famous ski resort that is located in the northern part of Japan, has been a popular ski destination for international tourists since 2001. Among foreign travellers to Niseko, Australians are one of the dominant groups of visitors. With the large number of Australian visitors, the area has been transformed into ‘Little Australia’ where Australian pubs and shops and English signs are becoming elements of the city’s landscape. Despite the growing media attention, academic interest in this phenomenon has been rather limited. In response, this paper will explore this phenomenon through various theoretical concepts in migration studies and sociology including mobility, contact zone, diaspora and cosmopolitanism aiming to raise the social significance of this phenomenon in the local-global context.

Globalization has typically been regarded as challenging representative democracy at the state level. This chapter outlines four of these challenges-that of democratic externalities, of transnational global processes and supranational organizations, of cosmopolitan norms, and of effective and justified representation at the global level. It then explores three solutions that have been put forward to meet them: scaling up to a supra-national regional or even a global democracy for certain issues; creating a trans-national network of democratic bodies that address different issues and functions; or having international associations of representative states under the equal control of their elected representatives. Whilst the first and second solutions are shown to create problems of both representation surpluses and deficits-some groups get over-represented and other groups under-represented, it is argued that the third solution can avoid both these difficulties and that it addresses the challenges more directly.

Ementa da disciplina: Globalização, supranacionalidade e sociedades contemporâneas. A atualidade das declarações de direitos humanos: da Europa às Américas e o mundo. Direitos humanos e desafios humanitários. Sistemas de proteção dos Direitos Humanos e o século XXI: conflito entre universalismo e relativismo cultural. Diversidade, cosmopolitismo e minorias. Autodeterminação dos povos e emancipação. Direitos Humanos e o diálogo entre as cortes internacionais e nacionais: a ordem jurídica brasileira.

Arguments for the preservation of culture are based on an extremely problematic essentialist conception of culture as a fixed entity. The inadequacy of the essentialist conception has received increasing recognition, but an adequate positive conception has yet to take its place. This essay reframes the debate about cultural preservation by proposing a new conception of culture as conversation.  The new conception acknowledges the fluidity and internal contestation that occurs within actual cultures, and the agency of a culture’s members in creating, transmitting and revising that culture. We make this new conception our basis for proposing that a proper concern for the value of a culture should be realized in enabling its members to sustain it, not to preserve some pre-existing essence. Adopting this more viable notion of culture also changes our conception of what needs to be done to sustain it, and allows us to acknowledge and better deal with the complex arguments for and against sustaining culture.

Martha Nussbaum’s recent book, The Cosmopolitan Tradition: A Noble but Flawed Ideal, is profound and insightful. Humility and dignity are two central virtues in all major religions and ethical systems, which express the equal status of human beings. Nussbaum emphasizes the value of dignity in the spheres of morality and human behavior. While agreeing with her on this issue, I also stress the value of humility in these areas.

In this chapter, I argue that we must think about justice for all animals through the cosmopolitan lens. After some preliminary remarks about global justice and cosmopolitanism, I explore the ways in which the current global order maintains and exacerbates systems of violence and oppression that target nonhuman animals. I argue that the theoretical foundations of cosmopolitanism necessitate the inclusion of many, if not all, sentient animals. Furthermore, I suggest that defenders of nonhuman animal rights should be cosmopolitans about global justice and explain why this does not require us to forsake our special relationships. I conclude with a plea to both mainstream defenders of cosmopolitanism and defenders of political justice for nonhuman animals to unite in developing genuinely inclusive theories of justice.

Chapter 5, in Southeast Asian Culture and Heritage in a Globalising World - Diverging Identities in a Dynamic Region, edited by Rahil Ismail, Brian Shaw, and Ooi Giok Ling, published by Ashgate, 2009 (http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&isbn=9780754689140&lang=cy-gb)

In Weihui’s banned novel, _Shanghai Babe_ (1999), the social effects of globalization can be seen in changing ethical discourses concerning what it is to be a responsible citizen, friend or lover. Beginning with a discussion of cosmopolitanism and cultural citizenship, this paper explores how class inequalities and gender hierarchies undercut these ideals. For while the novel celebrates cosmopolitan choice and cultural empowerment, its plot also foregrounds the fragility of interpersonal commitments in the face of market capitalism’s promotion of both a culture of immediate pleasure and an elite culture based on deferred gratification. Similarly, the novel celebrates sexual freedom, but its graphic accounts of the protagonist’s sado-masochistic affair with a married German businessman may leave readers wary of the dangers of transgressing conventional norms.

TOC to the Revised First Edition (2020) of this reader, which now includes chapters on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the ethics of human enhancement. The reader now covers a more fulsome range of topics that undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines will find useful, from international relations to global aid to environmental protection.

Despite a European training and an early career working with Peter Behrens, a migration from Vienna to the Australian state of Queensland positioned the architect Karl Langer (1903-1969) at the very edge of both European and Australian modernism. Confronted by tropical heat and glare, the economics of affordable housing, fiercely proud and regional architectural practices, and a suspicion of the foreign, Langer moulded the European language of international modernism to the unique climatic and social conditions of tropical Australia.

Applying a dual-process framework to in-depth interviews and survey data, this article explores behavioural manifestations of intercultural attitudes for white majority Norwegians. The article builds upon established literatures on social cognition showing that humans operate with two separate cognitive systems. Affective 'automatic' heuristics often generate negative stereotypes, aversive emotions and behavioural responses to ethnic diversities. In contrast, the 'discursive' cognitive system, which stores cultural scripts, motivates predominantly egalitarian aspirations and performances. As people balance their behaviours according to contextual evaluations of costs and benefits, the article's findings indicate a tendency to practise openness and civility in public and spatio-temporally bounded encounters, and to reject or exclude the Other in half or more of privately made selection decisions.

​This book investigates the global hub airport as an exemplar of cosmopolitan culture and space. A machine made for movement, itself perched at the crossroads of the world’s incessant mobility, the airport is both a symbol of and stage for the ways in which we construct and inhabit the world today.

Taking an ethnographically-inflected approach, this study brings together knowledge of the moving body from dance and performance and the study of systems of mobility within cultural and mobilities studies, in order to call attention to the kinaesthetic experience of global space. What is the choreography of the global airport? How does it perform on us. How do we perform within it?

Extending thinking about contemporary cosmopolitanism and cultural identity, and the performativity of places and identities, this book is essential reading for those interested in cultural debates around globalisation, the innovative application of performance theory towards everyday experience, and interdisciplinary methodologies.
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“This is more than an original exploration of the choreographed spatiality of airports. It is for all those interested by the way one moves in and is moved by space in the era of transnational mobility. What’s more, the text itself is a well choreographed festival of intelligently deployed theory speaking to acutely observed ethnographic material traversed by sharp socio-political observations that make it a pleasure to read.” (Ghassan Hage, School of Social and Political Science, University of Melbourne, Australia)

“Choreographing the Airport is a deeply-grounded study of hubs of contemporary global circulation — of bodies, affects, and cultures. No longer imaginable as the sole province of a transnational elite class, airports now function as critical arteries for the movement of refugees, migrants, transnational families, and others. As Shih Pearson’s nuanced examination demonstrates, airports bear a complex relationship to their geographic locations as well as their cosmopolitan functions — a relationship made all the more complex when considered from the perspective of the kinesthetic/somatic experience of its temporary inhabitants. Employing a kinesthetic auto-ethnographic method and combining performance and dance/movement theory, and postcolonial critique, Shih Pearson goes beyond a purely architectural analysis and asks us to attend to how and where we occupy those spaces, either in concert with or occasionally indifferent to global capitalism’s imperatives, asking us to consider the urgently relevant question, “what is it to move in this space?’” (Karen Shimakawa, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU, USA)

Tackling global injustice requires appropriate and effective institutions as well as cosmopolitan solidarity. This paper assumes that the ‘constitutionalized world society’ theorized by Habermas offers a viable proposal to make the protection and promotion of human rights more feasible. His account of solidarity, however, reveals a conundrum: If strong forms of solidarity grow out of shared political institutions and a related collective identity but it is precisely those institutions that we need to enhance at the global level, then how can we build sufficient solidarity to support this process? Habermas relies on a global consensus on human rights, but I argue that his version of cosmopolitan solidarity is too weak to motivate the measures needed to fully realize economic, social and cultural rights and the package of institutional reforms that he proposes. We thus need a narrative of the human condition that can lend additional support to the idea of human rights and cosmopolitan duties. I find the seeds of such a position, which I call cosmocommonism, in the work of Nancy. Having shown how this can motivate cosmopolitanism and support for human rights, I then consider in the conclusion its compatibility with the political institutions that Habermas proposes.

The idea of the nation has been considered to have delivered political modernity from its native Europe to the rest of the world. The same applies, though more implicitly, to those paradoxes inherent to the nationalist ideology – that between universalism and national particularity and that between liberal nationalism and imperialism. This article seeks to complicate these theses by looking at the interpretations of nationalism, imperialism, and cosmopolitanism provided by Liang Qichao, one of the most influential Chinese intellectuals in early twentieth century, during his exile in Japan when increasingly exposed to the encounter between worlds. This reading also engages with the wider debates on modernity/modernities in non-Western societies through showing that neither the " consumers of modernity " approach nor the " creative adaptations " approach can be easily applied here. I argue that the various tensions, contingencies and historical situatedness in Liang's accounts of the nation-state structure represent and constitute the paradox of the structure itself. They also shed light on contemporary debates about the limits of our political imagination in the misnamed " global politics " beyond the false opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism.

Social media facilitates a global–local orientation to the world that allows individuals to engage in virtual community-building and participate in communication to build global citizenship. This research situates virtual cosmopolitanism in the age of new media and globalization, describing it as a means for trans-local and transnational community-building for social justice movements and activism, including community liaison-building across corporeal borders and boundaries. New media as a site of imagined communities that become larger than their component parts is then analyzed through examining several virtual cosmopolitan communities. The essay concludes with assumptions about the qualities of virtual cosmopolitan communities, and recommendations for how they can facilitate intercultural liaisons for social justice activism and community-building across difference.

The aim of this paper is to situate the Sardinian village within the flux of contemporary social transformations that stand poised to redefine it. Specifically, it examines the highland village of Orgosolo, understanding it as a site that concentrates a clear set of cultural self-definitions that stand opposed to perceptions of life beyond the locality. A key element of local discourse is a view of the collective historical experience that
underscores the social, political, and cultural marginality of rural life in central Sardinia, and associates the village with a dissident identity that is reaffirmed by a social memory of violence suffered at the hand of powerful outsiders from Antiquity onwards. Yet, this perspective on the locality is not the sole one, and as such the village presents a contested site where the normative traditionalist vision holds little traction among an ascendant generation of urban-oriented youth who, for their part, reject the past and any definition of village identity explicitly associated with it.

There are growing waves of ‘desirable’ migrants from Asia moving to New Zealand, a place experiencing increasing ethnic diversity, particularly in its largest metropolitan region Auckland. In purely demographic terms much of this diversity has been generated by policy shifts since the 1980s and the adoption of a comparatively liberal immigration policy based on personal merit without discrimination on the grounds of race, national or ethnic origin. Due to these changes, migrants from China, and Asia more broadly, have become increasingly significant in migration flows into New Zealand. This in turn makes New Zealand a valuable case study for understanding how Chinese migrants integrate into and affect their host nation.

Wang attempts to close a gap in contemporary research by relating cosmopolitanism to migration, particularly in the Asian context. With a cosmopolitan gaze towards migration studies, she makes four key contributions to the ongoing scholarly discussion. Firstly, this is the first comprehensive study to use cosmopolitanism as a framework to study the lives of contemporary Chinese migrants, with implications for migration studies as a whole. It sheds light on the relationship between cosmopolitanism and migrant mobility, taking a new approach to examine the living paradigms of international migrants. Secondly, this book identifies the emergence and development of cosmopolitanism outside the domain of Western middle-class groups. The concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ is utilised to break down the Eurocentric notion of cosmopolitanism, and to show the role played by Chinese rootedness during the process of becoming cosmopolitan and encountering diversity. Thirdly, the book advances and enriches the knowledge of studies in ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, by focusing on ‘cosmopolitanism from below’, locating quotidian and ‘down-to-earth’ cosmopolitan engagements that are grounded in everyday migrant lives. Fourthly, it looks at the emotional dimension of migrants negotiating difference and engaging in cosmopolitanism, particularly the ways in which emotions undermine and promote the development of cosmopolitan sociability.

Samuel Scheffler has argued that people value tradition for its own sake because they view it as accumulated experience, and as playing an important role in forming their personal integrity, structuring their lives, and providing them with a sense of belonging. These reasons, according to Scheffler, are de facto justifications that people offer for choosing to act on purely traditional grounds. In this essay, I argue that these de facto reasons must be supplemented if they are to be seen as de jure rational grounds for valuing tradition for its own sake. Such a supplementation would open up the possibility of articulating a coherent theory of moderate cosmopolitanism.