ABSTRACT
Globalizing trends and forces, especially in a post-Cold War and post-September 11 world, raise major questions about the nature and scope of justice, democracy, and citizenship and their application both within and beyond sovereign states. Recognition of the pressing need to respond to global issues from ongoing economic and financial crises and deepening global inequalities, to mass migration, escalating trafficking in persons, HIV/AIDS, and environmental catastrophes has fostered renewed interest in cosmopolitan discourse and its relevance to twenty-first-century governance. This ongoing re-evaluation of cosmopolitan ideas also takes place against a backdrop of rising religious fundamentalisms (across all religions and regions) and other neoconservative movements, which explicitly reject human rights discourse as western, a threat to national sovereignty, individualist, and/or “anti-family.” At the same time, contemporary forms of conflict, including the “war on terror” and its promotion of the securitization of everyday life, pose profound challenges to proponents of cosmopolitanism; it is increasingly difficult to articulate and defend the normative importance of international law and norms in the face of unequal global power dynamics, democratic deficits throughout UN institutions, and the cynical use of international standards by dominant powers.
