Monday Nov. 24th 12:00-13:15
WDR 2201
Lunch will be provided!
Global governance is tightening and foreshadows that world state formation will become a live political issue in this century. Should this prospect be seen as a mere scaling-up of familiar ideas about statehood, to deal with global urgency around everything from climate change to public health to dark criminality? What about many people who fear a moral vacuum of authority and a concentration of power that would be dystopian in its upshot? Can a texture of life congenial to liberty and tradition survive the scale of new global institutions and cosmopolitan openness? Should opponents of technocratic global governance merely aim to stand athwart the scaling up of political institutions, or is there any constitutional alternative that could seize the global horizon?
Adam K Webb will discuss key ideas from his recent book, The World’s Constitution: Spheres of Liberty in the Future Global Order. It offers a radically different vision of future world order that adapts older resources in political thought, both Western and non-Western, to upend mainstream notions of statehood and sovereignty that have long been taken for granted. It offers an original ‘sphere pluralist’ framework that could reconcile liberty, tradition, and cosmopolitanism, and shift the balance of power back from state to society even as the scale of life expands across borders.
