Global governance is transacted through the medium of language. This chapter scrutinizes the standing of agents of justice who rely on words: experts, public intellectuals, advocacy groups, and the media, all of which have played major roles in both the Sustainable Development Goals and climate governance. Democracy and expertise exist in tension. There are problem-solving benefits in the integration of lay and expert perspectives that deliberative democratization would enable. The partial perspectives that public intellectuals offer ought to be reconciled in deliberation involving a broad public whose situated knowledges may increase the quality of outcomes. Non-governmental organizations, advocacy groups, and activists have important roles, but when they implicitly claim to represent categories of people they become democratically problematic – potentially distorting the content of global justice. Advocacy groups (such as Oxfam) have special duties toward the poor they claim to represent, which should embed their representation in deliberative democracy. The role of old and new media alike has been troublesome on matters of global justice, for example in contributing to polarization and organized climate change denial. In the context of the expressive overload that now pervades social media, it is necessary to cultivate deliberative spaces of reflection.

States and international organizations are central to global governance, and are significant formative agents of justice (and injustice), in advancing, sifting, or undermining principles. Despite their formal authority, states and international organizations cannot be relied upon to promote global justice. States in practice often veil their material self-interest in the language of justice. International organizations too can promote their own interest, as well as adhering rigidly to dominant discourses such as neoliberalism that restrict the kind of justice they can advance. Thus states and international organizations should primarily act as effectors of global justice whose task is to ensure the outcomes determined in more extensive deliberation are implemented. Some of their problematic formative agency aspects can be ameliorated by deliberative democratic means. The Open Working Group that finalized the content of the Sustainable Development Goals is indicative of the possibilities here, as it embodied novel deliberative features that curbed polarization, overcame impasse, and facilitated common-interest justifications. Engagements with civil society of the kind now glimpsed in global climate governance can open international organizations to deliberating competing conceptions of justice. This chapter concludes by showing how states and international organizations might expand their deliberative engagements.

This chapter examines how the growth of multiple visa categories created to accommodate labor shortages within South Korea’s restrictive immigration regime has led to the development of noncitizen rights hierarchies. I focus on three visa categories that represent the largest migrant groups in Korea: migrant workers, co-ethnic migrants, and so-called marriage migrants. Migrant claims to rights overlap with those made by citizens in their fundamental conceptions of human dignity and their appeals for state protections. But the scope of their claims has tended to be specific to their migrant subcategories or visa statuses: labor protections for migrant workers, equality among co-ethnic migrants, and state protections for marriage migrants. Even within the single national context of Korea, the struggle for rights by one migrant group does not necessarily make their claimed rights universal, or even accessible, to others.

Chapter 5 identifies the participation and roles of individuals in civil society. We argue that concentrating only on individuals would be more taxing and less meaningful than a multimodal analysis of interactions between individuals and associations in collective action fields. Individuals’ overlapping memberships allow organizations to monitor their environment, allocate resources, communicate, ally with others, and define the boundaries of their actions. At the same time, organizations enable individuals to meet similar others, strengthen their collective identity, share their skills and experiences, deal with threats, explore opportunities, and develop individual identities. We demonstrate how to use data on individual participation from the European Values Survey to conduct a relational, comparative analysis of the structure of political communities. Although multiple membership data are often employed to classify organizational types, here we investigate the structure and roles of the actors involved using projection and structurally equivalent blockmodeling. We examine networks of individuals and organizations in Italy, the UK, and Germany in 1990 and 2008 for a rich, comparative design that reveals the different profiles of political communities in those three countries.

Chapter 6 extends beyond the preceding chapter and explores collective action fields. It begins by reviewing some limitations with the previous approach: its granularity is limited to organizational types and not particular associations, and it does not incorporate the role of events in the political process in tandem for individuals and organizations. Our example illustrates how to overcome such limitations where data allow it. Focusing on civil society actors in one British city, Bristol, we explore the networks linking citizens’ associations, their core members, and local public events of both a contentious and non-contentious kind. We treat those networks from two different perspectives: first as a “restricted” 3-mode network in which ties only occur between elements that are logically proximate to each other (in our case, individuals participating in organizations that themselves promote or support specific events); then as a “general” 3-mode network that additionally allows for ties across all different modes (in our case, this means including individuals’ direct participation in events). We show that again, where data allow, multimodal political network analysis offers a fruitful avenue to the analysis of political settings.

Elections are moments when political hierarchies and differences become more visible and more contestable. Chapter 8 examines how the people’s parliaments responded to the 2013 General Elections in Mombasa. It reveals how instrumental and personalised political campaigns had a tense but mutually constitutive relationship with everyday publics. The intrigues of electoral competition sparked interest in public discussion and made it seem relevant to people’s everyday lives, while at the same time sharpening the contours of debate. A key finding concerns the challenges that faced civil society campaigns in attempting to realise changed discourses. This chapter argues that peace narratives purported by civil society in 2013 struggled to shift deep-set shared imaginaries. Explicitly non-partisan civil society groups struggled to keep out partisan competition as it was a source of perceived individual agency in politics. Also, formal structures were easily instrumentalised by politicians within their campaigns.

Chapter 4 compares the street parliaments explored in Chapter 3 with gatherings convened in civil society and on Facebook. It first interrogates a youth parliament that was registered as a civil society organisation, and, second, examines a youth parliament that was convened on Facebook. The Facebook group was formed as a reaction to some participants’ dissatisfaction with the civil society group’s hierarchical structure. With Chapter 3, it argues that, while limited, the conditions for open and plural discussion were evident across diverse gatherings, whether in the streets or on Facebook. This chapter also identifies an important exception to this: an overly fabricated gathering in civil society, which, in using hierarchy and protocol to create a disciplined and non-partisan public discussion, ended up compromising its creativity and dynamism.

In this chapter, I explore the destabilising role of social mobilisation and cultural shifts, in creating ruptures and generating demands for alternative energy systems and in actually doing the work of transition and wider transformative change by building alternative pathways. I briefly trace early struggles over energy systems from the London smogs and creation of the UK Factories Act during the industrial revolution, through the long histories of indigenous forms of activism against extractivism, to contemporary battles for energy and climate justice, and resistance to new infrastructures, projects and policies that further embed rather than disrupt the fossil fuel economy. I point to how mobilisations have sought to challenge existing political economies and distributions of power, as well as to construct alternative ones. I explore the interrelationships between strategies then describe the rich ecology of resistance, including lobbying, litigation and direct action, pressuring all parts of systems of production, finance and governance, as well as seeding alternatives for incumbent actors to crush or ignore, co-opt or replicate and learn from, or even support and scale up.

This chapter offers an introduction to Athens’ associations – groups of people who came together for some purpose, but which were neither families nor central state institutions. After broaching some problems of definition, it provides a gazetteer of some of the city’s better-known associations; it then provides a narrative of Athens’ associations over time, and closes with a brief discussion of the question of what relationship these groups had with Athens’ democratic form of government.

This chapter investigates civil society efforts to cultivate civic virtue through voter education programmes. We distinguish between five types of voter education: information, mobilisation, decision-making, comportment, and vigilance. Despite important differences within and between countries, we highlight how voter education efforts across all three countries seek to create "good citizens" who vote for "good leaders" by encouraging voters to internalize a civic, rather than patrimonial, register of virtue. This work has an important electoral effect and helps to imagine the Idea of civil society as a form of associational life that is of, and for, society and separate from, and capable of checking the state. At the same time, we show how, while these efforts have had some successes, they often inadvertently help to reinforce a patrimonial register – with voter education campaigns often undermined by a misunderstanding of the “problems” that need to be solved, by a failure to provide clear moral direction when other actors do not adhere to official rules, and by the complex and often contradictory roles played by civil society actors themselves. Thus, while voter education is broadly similar across all three countries, the impact is contingent on local contexts

Chapter 4 explores how the Haskell Free Library and Opera House, a theatre and library built directly on the US-Canada border and opened in 1904, has become both an exceptional and exemplary civic institution in a time of increased securitisation. This chapter considers the Haskell as a local institution that promises to ameliorate geopolitical and geoeconomic antagonisms, but from a position within these realms rather than outside them. The Haskell’s civic promise is an is an effect of political economy and historical geography, and is the result of more than a century-long process of securitisation. Its civic appeal depends not so much on its equidistance from the state and the market but on a deeply embedded relationship with them. Seen this way, the Haskell becomes a distinctively theatrical – and distinctively social – technology of political economic governance: it localises social bonds that state-secured marketisation threatens to disperse and, in doing so, it retrieves social exchange from its wholesale appropriation by the state and the market.

This chapter consists of three sections. First, I analyze PIJ’s view of the state as outlined in its political philosophy with the perceived need to control it. I then proceed to analyze the constituents of the state, the political and democratic processes as outlined by PIJ, and the framework in which these processes take place. We see that there are inherent democratic deficiencies and limitations to its outline of a just society. The future society of PIJ can, at best, be described as one that is non-liberal, yet rights based. Third, after assessing the conception of a just society, I conclude this chapter by arguing that PIJ’s desire to return to a perceived ideal past is reflected in its analysis of violence, which is of a conservative nature.

Considers the challenges facing the state in contemporary democratic societies where it must find a balanced way of relating to traditional institutional religions, a flux of modern variants and assorted forms of belief and imported cultures, at a time when secularism is becoming steadily more assertive, and where all must be given autonomy and the freedom to mix and mutate. Takes into account the disruption caused by protracted wars in largely Muslim countries, combined with the ongoing migrant crisis, together with residual ISIS-related terrorism, all of which inevitably impose constraints upon domestic policies of multiculturalism or pluralism and impact upon civil society. Notes that these developments are accompanied by varied national progress in terms of a grid of equality and non-discrimination legislation and in subscribing to supranational human rights. This gives rise to some discussion of cultural dislocation, the levelling effect of equality legislation and perhaps the desiccation that threatens to accompany the present rights-driven approach to complex social problems.