ABSTRACT
Democracy, States, and the Struggle for Global Justice (hereafter DS) charts the myriad ways in which neoliberal globalization has transformed states, both powerful and weak, and how these changes have impacted projects for democracy and justice at local, national, and global levels. It does this by exploring an array of topics (e.g. immigration, war, global warming) in a range of settings (the US, EU, Latin America, rural and urban) using a diverse set of methodologies (political philosophy, sociology, activist ethnography, and literary theory). The thrust of DS is critical, but embedded and reconstructive: nearly every essay explores possibilities for restructuring the national and global. And these explorations are neither utopian nor ideological in the negative senses of those terms; rather each engages current actors and institutions, as imperfect as each may be, in order to extract and amplify the political possibilities of various movements and actors. Despite the differences in frameworks, topics, and methodologies, there are three non-trivial points of agreement to which nearly every essay subscribes.
