Authors:Janne Mende, Thomas Müller Pages: 91 - 97 Abstract: In IR and beyond, there is considerable debate about the ways global governance, the transnationalisation of publics, and changes in communication technologies have affected the interplay between publics and global politics. This debate is characterised by disagreements about how to conceptualise publics in the global realm—and whether or not they exist in the first place. We seek to contribute to this debate by disentangling the various meanings associated with publics in order to get a better grasp of how publics shape and are shaped by global politics. We do so in two steps. First, we distinguish four different manifestations of publics: audiences, spheres, institutions, and public interests. Second, we identify four key dynamics that affect the evolution and interplay of these manifestations in global politics: the distinction between public and private, changes in communications technologies, the politics of transparency, and the need to legitimise global governance. These interrelated dynamics reshape the publicness of global politics while sustaining the plurality of the publics that partake in it. PubDate: 2023-08-31 DOI: 10.17645/pag.v11i3.7417 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 3 (2023)
Authors:Benjamin Herborth Pages: 98 - 108 Abstract: Publics have traditionally been conceived as sites of social integration. While discord, controversy, and contestation may be acknowledged, theorising publics and especially public spheres are characteristically geared toward the production of consensus and/or the conditions of the possibility of unified decision-making. On this view, publics beyond the nation-state are reduced to conceptual extensions of the nation-state—The move to a higher level of aggregation, imagined as global or international, seems to make no conceptual difference. Against this, I propose to conceptualize publics as sites of the constitution of social struggles. To this end, I introduce Nancy Fraser’s concept of “subaltern counterpublics,” previously applied exclusively to national contexts, to the study of global politics. With a view to future empirical application, I discuss three promising sites for the further study of subaltern counterpublics in global politics: colonial public spheres, transnational social activism, and the circulation of extreme right-wing conspiracy tropes. Taken together, I conclude, these three sites of inquiry provide an important corrective to a statist concept of the public in which the place, purpose, and direction of publics are always already taken for granted. PubDate: 2023-08-31 DOI: 10.17645/pag.v11i3.6792 Issue No:Vol. 11, No. 3 (2023)
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