Events

Global Governance & Democracy Spring Lectures

In November 2010, the new interdisciplinary project on ‘Global Governance and Democratic Government’ was launched, aiming to address questions such as: How can global governance be democratised? What can democracy on a transnational level mean? And how can notions of democratic legitimacy be implemented within specific terrains of global governance? Eight researchers from different fields (political science, law, political economy, political philosophy) set off to provide (parts of) an answer to these startling but complicated questions. In order to feed the group discussion and to trigger a debate on these topics amongst a broader audience, the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies invited a number of distinguished scholars during the spring of 2011 for a lecture series on ‘Global Governance & Democracy’.

Professor Jan Aart Scholte (Warwick University) opened the series on the 23th of February, with a stimulating lecture on ‘Re-envisioning Global Democracy’. Scholte is not only the author of a number of influential books and articles on Globalisation and global democracy, but is also actively involved in the network ‘Building Global Democracy’, an action-oriented research initiative with a large input from civil society that aims to study how global decisions can be democratised, and, especially, how citizens and civil society actors think of this and learn to address global issues. In his lecture, Professor Scholte advocated a transscalar, transcultural form of global democracy and provided a number of key concepts to think about an ambitious project of globalising democracy.

On March, 23, Professor Andreas Kalyvas from the New School of Social Research in New York addressed the issue of how to democratise global issues from a completely different perspective. In his lecture, he argued that the influx of large number of irregular migrants in Europa creates a terrain for new citizenship practices that go beyond borders and classical notions of citizenship and sovereignty. Movements of irregular migrants (especially in countries such as Greece, Italy etcetera) have the potential to become a constituent force for a new political constellation. This challenging thesis triggered an interesting discussion about the role of borders, about how migrants can be really said to constitute a new political subject, and on the notion of citizenship in a post-national constellation.

The third lecture was given by Professor Jan Wouters, director of the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies. He showed how democracy was slowly becoming an important concern in international law, and asked the question whether international law did not need its own democratic revolution. In the midst of the so-called Arab Spring, which took many Western governments by surprise, this was a challenging question that went right to the core of the debate that was going on about the role of international law and international institutions in supporting democratisation processes.

Finally, Professor Andreas Føllesdal from Oslo University gave a lecture on ‘Cosmopolitan Democracy: neither a Category Mistake nor a Categorical Imperative’ on the 11th of May. He systematically refuted a whole series of arguments against the possibility of democratizing multilevel governance. Having studied the democratization of the European Union since many years, his talk was focused in particular on the so-called democratic deficit in Europe, and why it is important and possible to address it. Arguing that democracy should fundamentally be about pluralist competition for power, he provided the audience and the research group with a number of extremely valuable reflections about how to conceive of democracy on levels beyond the nation-state.

Given the success of this first series of lectures on global governance and democracy, which were attended by many hundreds of students, researchers and interested citizens, there are already plans for new events next year. We will then focus probably more on how to apply these ideas about the democratization of global governance on the specific issue areas we are working on, such as environmental governance, security governance, human rights governance and economic governance. You will read everything about this on this website.

View photo gallery Spring Lectures 2011