ABSTRACT
While our understandings of democracy have evolved within a particular conception of citizenship and nationhood, the emergence of new global structures, institutions, and modes of governance necessitate recognition that democracy, as traditionally understood, is not adequate to conceptualize current modes of political engagement. Note is often made of the global expansion of human rights, generally coupled with the assumption that this expansion is synonymous with the spread of democracy. However, we need to recognize that the expansion of rights, domestically and internationally, is associated with a partial but significant shift in the mode of political engagement, from democracy or republicanism to the principle of the individual as “agent.” The “decline” of the nation-state, one could argue, is symptomatic of an even more dramatic but hidden revolution, the emergence of agency.
