Carol C. Gould

Abstract: The emergence of cross-border communities and transnational associations requires new ways of thinking about the norms involved in democracy in a globalized world. Given the significance of human rights fulfillment, including social and economic rights, I argue here for giving weight to the claims of political communities while also recognizing the need for input by distant others into the decisions of global governance institutions that affect them. I develop two criteria for addressing the scope of democratization in transnational contexts— common activities and impact on basic human rights —and argue for their compatibility. I then consider some practical implications for institutional transformation and design, including new forms of transnational representation.

In her 2004 book Carol Gould addresses the fundamental issue of democratizing globalization, that is to say of finding ways to open transnational institutions and communities to democratic participation by those widely affected by their decisions. The book develops a framework for expanding participation in crossborder decisions, arguing for a broader understanding of human rights and introducing a new role for the ideas of care and solidarity at a distance. Reinterpreting the idea of universality to accommodate a multiplicity of cultural perspectives, the author takes up a number of applied issues, including the persistence of racism, cultural rights, women's human rights, the democratic management of firms, the use of the Internet to enhance political participation, and the importance of empathy and genuine democracy in understanding terrorism and responding to it. Accessibly written with a minimum of technical jargon this is a major contribution to political philosophy.

This paper is a theoretical and empirical investigation into whether persons in subordinate social contexts possess agency and if they do, how do we recognise and recover their agency given the oppressive conditions of their lives. It aims to achieve this through forging closer links between the philosophical arguments and the ethnographic evidence of women's agency. Through such an exercise, this paper hopes to bridge the existing gap between feminist theoretical interventions and feminist politics as well as to increase ‘sociological awareness’ within feminist philosophical arguments. In order to think about women's agency in oppressive social contexts, the paper evaluates the suitability of existing theoretical frameworks for examining, describing and capturing the autonomy of persons and concludes that a new and a more complex thinking is required to facilitate thinking about human agency within oppressive transcultural contexts. The social context of subordination, the exhibition of agency within and oppressive context and the application of the new theoretical framework is illustrated in an extensive empirical study of the contact with modernity and its accompanying ideas of autonomy and individual rights of rural women belonging to two districts in Rajasthan, North western India.

In response to critical discussions of her Globalizing Democracy and Human Rights by William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, and David Schweickart, Gould grants that globalization and U.S. Empire are intertwined, but she argues that this does not refute that global and transnational interconnections and networks are developing that are in need of substantive democracy. Gould further seeks to clarify two main interpretive misunderstandings of her critics. First, even though she rejects “all affected” as a criterion for determining the participants of institutional decision-making, she does leave room for participation of the “affected” when the fulfillment of their basic rights is at stake. Second, she argues that her vision of democratizing economic institutions is not fundamentallydifferent from the traditional idea of workplace democracy. Other topics addressed are the normative grounding of human rights, the error of reducing human rights to positive law, and the incoherency of the notion that democracy can be imposed by the barrel of a gun. Finally, Gould maintains that empathy, if properly understood, should be extended to terrorists, while we should also strongly condemn their rejection of noncombatant immunity. [Abstract prepared by the Editors.]