Cosmopolitanism

The cosmopolitan vision of a just global order is surely captivating. Nevertheless, while cosmopolitan theorists dispute the ability of the old sovereignty dogma to provide a satisfactory alternative to any hegemony, one cannot discard the concern about a normative project that – in practice – may end lending itself to the political and military leaders of powerful states. Such a concern is herein recast in ‘causal terms’ and employed as main claim in a ‘counterfactual thought experiment’. In other words, cosmopolitanism is considered as an element in the causal geo-historical complex responsible for the current hierarchical pattern in international relations. The counterfactual question arising from the main claim is the following: removed cosmopolitanism from its causal complex, would international hierarchy differ today, and how? Such a questions calls in the critical-realist view of causation, which is applied as a means to disclose the casual mechanisms capable of producing hierarchy. As a result, the social logics of hierarchy are brought to light and, finally, the role played by cosmopolitan discourse in the legitimation of international inequality.

Keywords: cosmopolitanism, hierarchy, counterfactual, critical realism, retroduction

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers?  Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations?  Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

The paper is about legal cosmopolitanism, a subset of institutional cosmopolitanism that focuses on the legal mediation between morality and politics and on the process of 'juridification' of international relations. The problem from which the paper stems is the lack of an integrated perspective on legal cosmopolitanism able to combine moral (or normative) and empirical concerns, resulting – in turn – in a limited understanding of the nature and organization of the cosmopolitan political community. First, a 'deconstructive' reading is applied to the cosmopolitan project, as as critical tool able to expose the gap or inadequation between the transcendent value of justice and its concrete instantiations in human culture. Secondly, being the International Criminal Court (ICC) a prime example of legal cosmopolitan institutions, the Court is assumed as a test-case for legal cosmopolitanism. Finally, the paper concludes that the translation of cosmopolitanism, as normative theory, into a coherent political project cannot be taken for granted. International political theory can no longer evade the question of the nature and organization of the cosmopolitan political community, and it ought to question whether the international order is an institutional arrangement capable of supporting the normative aspirations of cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: Legal cosmopolitanism, Normative Theory, International Criminal Court, Deconstruction

The Roman concept of citizenship was novel and influential. Instead of an exclusive citizen body, Rome reached out to neighboring tribes, allies, and former enemies to form an inclusive citizenship which molded Rome’s territory into a nation and thus created the modern concept of supra-ethnic citizenship of a state. This process is reflected in the policy of Stoic cosmopolitanism, as encapsulated in the writings of Cicero and other Roman Stoics.

The paper discusses the birth of cosmopolitanism and the Cynic school of philosophy. The role of Zeno and the early Hellenistic Stoics is highlighted and the ideology of Stoic cosmopolitanism is expounded. To ground the historical argument, a survey of the development of Roman citizenship from c. 400 BC to Augustus is put forth. Critical analysis of Cicero’s expression of Stoic cosmopolitanism forms the heart of the paper, where duties, virtues, the universal commonwealth, oikeiosis, and the ius gentium are all discussed. Lastly, the expression of this cosmopolitan policy is highlighted against the development of Roman citizenship after Cicero until the Edict of Caracalla in AD 212.

This is the story of the greatest rock band you never heard. Navicula was born and bred in Bali, soothed teenage angst with Seattle Sound in the 90s, and recorded seven critically acclaimed albums. Their music rallies against social injustice and environmental degradation. In 2012, Navicula’s serpentine path of concerts, recording sessions, and media appearances across Indonesia and beyond led them to record at LA’s legendary Record Plant. Based on six years knowing Navicula as ethnographer, fan, and friend, this paper engages Berger’s notion of stance to address how methodological assumptions and theoretical lenses create blind spots to Navicula’s music as lived experience. It asks if phenomenology gets closer to music’s meaning in people’s lives, if preoccupation with the roots—and routes—of music’s texts undermines their valuing in practice, what activist musicians teach about shaping public consensus, and what current trajectories exist for “peripheral” musicians to gain international respect. Navicula’s story rightly elicits praise for the creative, collaborative work and visionary ethos that rocket-launched an off-the-radar band from Bali to LA. Yet the propensities of popular music disciplines may reduce their work to (at best) symbolic resistance or (at worst) xenocentrism. To do so is to lose the plot.

La mobilité des jeunes au sein de l’espace européen est une
priorité pour les autorités de l’Union qui multiplient les
mesures pour la favoriser, y voyant un moyen de renforcer le
sentiment d’appartenance européenne. Si les séjours et
échanges continentaux, notamment pendant les études
supérieures, attirent de plus en plus de candidats, la mobilité
est encore loin d’être accessible à tous les jeunes Européens

The Modern Greek experience is intimately tied to the city as a physical space, a national symbol, a nostalgic memory, and a fantasy of grandeur. This course focuses on such celebrated Mediterranean and world cities as Athens, Istanbul, Izmir, Thessaloniki, Alexandria, and, finally, Chicago to detail the Modern Greek urban experience and thus engage with the broader themes of colonialism, modern appropriations of antiquity, nation-building, multi-ethnic coexistence, war and refugeehood, and, finally, immigration and the recreation of homeland in the diaspora. Students will work with a variety of textual and visual sources and undertake original research in Chicago’s Greektown. No prior knowledge of Modern Greek history is required.

Is there such a thing as a Mediterranean city? The Mediterranean Sea is home to some of the oldest, and most celebrated urban settlements in the world. Its cities have nonetheless experienced such repeated and deep transformations in the past two centuries as to become virtually unrecognizable with regards to the built environment, the ethnic composition of their population, and their discursive representations. This course takes a critical look at these developments, (and, no less, at the narratives employed to account for them), from a trans-national and inter-disciplinary perspective. By observing through the combined perspectives of history, urban studies, and anthropology; by employing a variety of sources (from literature to film to audiovisual testimonies); and by focusing on specific urban centers east and west, north and south of the Mediterranean (Istanbul, Salonica, Algiers, Marseille, Trieste, Athens, Tel Aviv), this course will examine the cities as shaped by the imperial state, the western traveller, the colonial urbanist, the nationalist visionary, the uprooted refugee, the Holocaust survivor, and the fighting soldier, in a kaleidoscopic attempt to understand the dramatic and traumatic experience of modernity in the streets and piazzas of the Mediterranean.

With Greece, Cyprus, Turkey, Syria and Egypt in crisis, the Eastern Mediterranean has once again caught the world’s attention. This course offers a historical perspective to current developments by examining the deep social, political, and cultural processes that transformed the Eastern Mediterranean from the mid-19th century Ottoman Reforms to the 1922 Greco-Turkish exchange of populations and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919. It explores the interconnected processes of social restructuring, cultural interaction, ethnic strife and sectarian violence and questions the common image of the Eastern Mediterranean as at once a model of cosmopolitan conviviality and an archetype of unbridled violence. Topics include: the modernization of the Ottoman Empire, colonial power in Egypt, the rise of Balkan and Near Eastern nationalisms, communal life and urban coexistence in the port-cities, the multiple presences of the West and its images of the Orient, the Balkan Wars and population movements, and, finally, present-day nostalgic reconstructions of the fin-de-siècle Mediterranean in popular and elite culture.

This paper juxtaposes two visions of Derrida’s short essay Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort!, namely a translation and a critical article. The focus of the investigation will be the manipulations that both texts impose on the “original” French text. Thereby, an insight is gained into the operation of interpretations on a canonized philosopher that can be seen to attack the very logic of canonization. What is of concern here is how texts (more than authors), propagate a certain view of an oeuvre that, on first sight, resists any stable vision of itself. The role of the paper then becomes to destabilize the two texts that it examines, to put them in motion using the “original” they are grafted upon.
This mobilization is achieved through a highly unconventional reading of text and translation, where the most material aspects of the text – italics, spacing – will be hypothesized to display the “system” of Cosmopolites most forcefully. Once this system is constituted, it will be utilized to complicate a monolithic interpretation of Derrida’s text. This process will reveal the constantly shifting (and highly underestimated) nature of “cosmopolitanism” in the later work of this French philosopher, a nature that is further explored by the use of the dyad political-abstract: interpretation and translation can be seen to incline towards one of these two poles. Finally, an argument is made for a context-sensitive reading of Derrida, one that remains conscious of the provisional nature of this philosopher’s expressions.

This essay is framed by arguments about India’s uneven neoliberal globalization-- the conditions of precarity, limited rights and poverty alongside changing professional opportunities for slum dwellers -- and it draws on recent conceptualisations of the cosmopolitan subaltern, based on the connectivity, solidarities and  affective bonds enabled by globalization  in its discussion of  new constructions of subalternity. Representations of the male urban subject  examined in two acclaimed texts about the Mumbai slums --Danny Boyle’s film  Slumdog Millionaire (2008)  and Katherine Boo’s literary nonfiction  Beyond the Beautiful Forevers (2012) – are shown to reveal a variety of western mediated images of  consciousness and agency as shaped by social and political changes brought about by globalization.  The article argues that such reconstructions through narrative have their basis in field work research such as the case study and interview, usually undertaken in anthropology and ethnography, which has established that subjectivity can be defined through memory and reflection. It concludes that while accommodating space for individual agency and embracing normative concepts of rights and citizenship, the texts, especially Slumdog Millionaire, nevertheless do not forward collective claims for communal belonging, rights and ownership.