Cancelling Davos, boarding for Porto Alegre : on "globalization from below" and its political visions

english

2010

volume 3, issue 2

Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica
(Obvezni izvod spletne publikacije)

Despite the vast amounts of media coverage and plethora of books and articles on the alter-globalization movement (AGM), the movement's innovative solutionsand proposals have still not been addressed properly within the discipline of comparative politics. The aim of this article is, therefore, twofold: on one hand, the author examines the AGM's genuinely new political alternative, one founded on municipalized - yet global - democracy, horizontalism, and decentralization while, on the other, it addresses the epistemological transformation of comparative politics since many of the concepts and solutions the AGM offers are too elusive for traditional disciplines, classical theories, and Western epistemologies. The article starts from the supposition that for a long time the most important political innovations have not come from the traditional centers of political power, buthave rather been invented by the "newest social movements". In the last part, the article considers topical debates on global, world and cosmopolitan citizenship in the light of a conceptualization of translocal citizenship that, in the long run, may prove to be the single most subversive thing the AGM has recuperated

20.12.2023