Academic literature on the topic 'Globalizing civil societies'

Environmental skepticism denies the reality and importance of mainstream global environmental problems. However, its most important challenges are in its civic claims which receive much less attention. These civic claims defend the basis of ethical authority of the dominant social paradigm. The article explains how political values determine what skeptics count as a problem. One such value described is “deep anthropocentrism,” or the attempt to split human society from non-human nature and reject ecology as a legitimate field of ethical concern. This bias frames what skeptics consider legitimate knowledge. The paper then argues that the contemporary conservative countermovement has marshaled environmental skepticism to function as a rearguard for a maladaptive set of core values that resist public efforts to address global environmental sustainability. As such, the paper normatively argues that environmental skepticism is a significant threat to efforts to achieve sustainability faced by human societies in a globalizing world.

In 2013, the Institute for African Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences began a study of black communities in the USA. By now, the research was conducted in six states (Alabama, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Pennsylvania); in a number of towns as well as in the cities of Boston, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia and Chicago. The study shows that diasporas as network communities have already formed among recent migrants from many African countries in the U.S. These are diasporas of immigrants from individual countries, not a single “African diaspora”. On one hand, diasporas as an important phenomenon of globalization should become objects of global governance by means of regulation at the transnational level of both migration streams and foreign-born communities norms of existence. On the other hand, diasporas can be agents of social and political global governance, of essentially transnational impact on particular societies and states sending and accepting migrants, as evidenced by the African diasporas in the USA. Most American Africans believe that diasporas must and can take an active part in the home countries’ public life. However, the majority of them concentrates on targeted assistance to certain people – their loved ones back home. The forms of this assistance are diverse, but the main of them is sending remittances. At the same time, the money received from migrants by specific people makes an impact on the whole society and state. For many African states these remittances form a significant part of national income. The migrants’ remittances allow the states to lower the level of social tension. Simultaneously, they have to be especially thorough while building relationships with the migrant accepting countries and with diasporas themselves. Africans constitute an absolute minority among recent migrants in the USA. Nevertheless, directly or indirectly, they exert a certain influence on the establishment of the social life principles and state politics (home and foreign), not only of native countries but also of the accepting one, the U.S. This props up the argument that elaboration of norms and setting the rules of global governance is a business of not only political actors, but of the globalizing civil society, its institutions and organizations either. The most recent example are public debates in the American establishment, including President Obama, on the problem of immigration policy and relationships with migrant sending states, provoked by the 2014 U.S.–Africa Leaders Summit. Remarkably, the African diasporas represented by their leaders actively joined the discussion and openly declared that the state pays insufficiently little attention to the migrants’ needs and insisted on taking their position into account while planning immigration reform. However, Africans are becoming less and less “invisible” in the American society not only in connection with loud, but infrequent specific events. Many educated Africans who have managed to achieve a decent social status and financial position for themselves, have a desire not just to promote the adaptation of migrants from Africa, but to make their collective voice heard in American society and the state at the local and national levels. Their efforts take different forms, but most often they result in establishing and running of various diaspora organizations. These associations become new cells of the American civil society, and in this capacity affect the society itself and the government institutions best they can. Thus, the evidence on Africans in the USA shows that diasporas are both objects (to date, mainly potential) and real subjects of global governance. They influence public life, home and foreign policy of the migrant sending African countries and of migrant accepting United States, make a modest but undeniable contribution to the global phenomena and processes management principles and mechanisms. Acknowledgements. The research was supported by the grants of the Russian Foundation for Humanities: no. 14-01-00070 “African Americans and Recent African Migrants in the USA: Cultural Mythology and Reality of Intercommunity Relations”, no. 13-01-18036 “The Relations between African-Americans and Recent African Migrants: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Intercommunity Perception”, and by the grant of the Russian Academy of Sciences as a part of its Fundamental Research Program for 2014. The author is sincerely grateful to Veronika V. Usacheva and Alexandr E. Zhukov who participated in collecting and processing of the evidence, to Martha Aleo, Ken Baskin, Allison Blakely, Igho Natufe, Bella and Kirk Sorbo, Harold Weaver whose assistance in organization and conduction of the research was inestimable, as well as to all the informants who were so kind as to spend their time for frank communication.

Abstract. Although the sociological tradition in Russia reaches back to the late 19th century and is historically linked with western European sociological traditions, it is only since the end of the 1980s that contemporary Russian sociology has begun to blossom again and take tangible shape. This article elaborates the characteristic role that Russian sociology has played, now plays, and could possibly play in “globalizing sociology.” An integrative perspective or synthetic approach to knowledge most suitably defines the Russian tradition, placing sociology creatively between the humanities and natural sciences. This is partly due to the cultural and geographic diversity of a nation that crosses borders between east and west. Significant figures in the history of Russian sociology such as Pitirim Sorokin and Maxim Kovalevsky show how both importing and exporting sociological ideas constitute globalization, as well as the importance of traveling outside of one’s home nation to discover the views of other civil societies. The article gives an overview of problems, resources, and recent events in Russian sociology, highlighting lessons from Russia’s experience in the transition to democracy and from state to market. These two transitions pose significant challenges to academic autonomy for professional sociology that are widely shared in the discipline outside the Big Four of the United States, Britain, Germany, and France, further suggesting the potential importance of the Russian experience for globalizing sociology. Résumé. Bien que la tradition sociologique en Russie ait une histoire remontant à la fin du 19ième siècle et qu’elle soit historiquement liée aux traditions sociologiques d’Europe occidentale, c’est seulement depuis la fin des années 1980 que la sociologie russe contemporaine a commencé à se développer à nouveau et à prendre forme. Cet article traite du rôle caractéristique que la sociologie russe a joué, continue à jouer et pourrait probablement jouer dans le futur en termes de perspectives pour la ‘sociologie globale’. La tradition russe se définit le plus convenablement par une perspective intégrative ou une approche synthétique à la connaissance qui place la sociologie entre les sciences humaines et les sciences naturelles. Ceci est partiellement dû à la diversité culturelle et géographique d’une nation qui a des frontières avec l’Occident et l’Orient. L’étude de figures significatives de l’histoire de la sociologie russe tels Pitirim Sorokin et Maxime Kovalevsky montre comment l’importation et l’exportation des idées sociologiques constituent un élément de mondialisation. Mais, dans une telle étude, il faut galement s’attarder à l’importance du déplacement en dehors de sa nation d’origine à fin de découvrir les vues d’autres sociétés civiles. L’article donne une vue d’ensemble des problèmes réels, des ressources et des événements récents dans la sociologie russe. Il insiste également sur leçons de l’expérience de la Russie, un pays qui a connu une transition à la démocratie et au marché. Pour la sociologie professionnelle, ces deux transitions posent des défis significatifs à l’autonomie universitaire qui sont largement partagés dans la discipline en dehors des quatre grands que sont les États-Unis, la Grande-Bretagne, l’Allemagne et la France. L’expérience de la sociologie russe pour la mondialisation de la sociologie est doncpotentiellement importante.

Abstract. The challenges for sociology posed by global environmental crises are two-fold. First, the growing prevalence of environmental dilemmas in global society demand that a globalizing sociology also be an environmental sociology. This requires the discipline to refine its ability to integrate environmental influences into its conceptual frameworks on social change. Second, the effectiveness of society’s strategic responses to environmental crises depends on the degree to which understanding the generation of environmental problems and responding to them are sociologically informed. Consequently, sociologists can make important contributions to environmental improvement, through sociological research on environmental discourses within civil society. However, this can only be done if the first challenge is addressed. In this paper, we highlight coupled socioecological systems functioning in an embedded hierarchy of local, regional, and global scales. Strategic environmental response depends particularly on governance structures and the production and accessibility of knowledge and we focus our discussion on these two domains. Global environmental changes have introduced multiple sources of challenge for nation-states and for the ways in which democratic participation in governance becomes operative. The dramatic shifts in governance fomented by environmental concern in and of themselves require sociological attention; sociologists also have a role in evaluating the efficacy of these organizational networks for addressing environmental crises. Second, we turn our attention to the means by which these environmental changes have challenged the production of knowledge about the environment. For example, the limits of traditional methods of scientific inquiry accompany an erosion in society’s confidence in science as a harbinger of progress, all the while simultaneously pushing science — however reluctantly for scientists themselves — into a position of political prominence. We close with suggestions for future sociological attention to governance and knowledge, and the ways this projects sociology more effectively into the global milieu in which environmental change will be increasingly salient. Résumé. Les défis que constitue la crise environnementale pour la sociologie présentent un double aspect. Tout d’abord, la prévalence des dilemmes environne mentaux dans une société mondiale exige d’une sociologie mondialisante qu’elle soit également une sociologie environnementale. Cela exige donc que cette discipline soit davantage en mesure d’intégrer à ses cadres conceptuels les influences que peuvent avoir les changements environnementaux sur les changements sociaux. En second lieu, l’efficacité potentielle des interventions stratégiques d’une société en regard des crises environnementales dépend de la mesure dans laquelle la sociologie éclaire notre compréhension de la source des problèmes environnementaux et de la manière d’y réagir. Par conséquent, les sociologues sont en mesure d’apporter d’importantes contributions à l’amélioration de l’environnement, en amenant la recherche sociologique à s’appuyer sur les discours environnementaux qui ont cours dans la société civile. Toutefois, on ne peut y arriver que si l’on aborde le premier défi. Dans cet article, nous mettons brièvement en lumière les moyens par lesquels les systèmes, social et écologique, sont mutuellement constitutifs, c’est-à-dire qu’ils sont des systèmes socio-écologiques associés qui fonctionnent dans une hiérarchie enchâssée d’échelles locale, régionale et mondiale. Ensuite, parce que la stratégie d’intervention environnementale dépendra en particulier des structures de gouvernance ainsi que de la production et de l’accessibilité des connaissances, nous analysons en détail ces deux domaines. Les changements environnementaux à l’échelle planétaires ont introduit de nombreux défis de tous types pour les nations-États et quant aux manières dont se met en oeuvre la participation démocratique à la gouvernance. Deuxièmement, nous étudierons les moyens par lesquels les changements environnementaux mondiaux ont, dans le même ordre d’idées, remis en question la production de connaissances sur l’environnement. Par exemple, les limites des méthodes traditionnelles d’investigation scientifique sont mises à jour, en même temps qu’elles propulsent la science sur la scène politique. D’autres formes de connaissances agissent également comme des « contre-connaissances » envers la dominance épistémique de la science sur l’environnement. Nous terminons l’article par quelques suggestions quant à l’attention de nature sociologique qu’il faudra porter dans le futur à la gouvernance et à la connaissance, et par un examen de la façon dont cela projette la sociologie tout de bon dans le milieu planétaire dans lequel les changements environnementaux seront de plus en plus marquants.

Governments rely more and more on experts to manage the increasingly complex problems posed by a growing, diversifying, globalizing world. Surplus technocracy, however, usually comes with deficits of democracy. While especially true in liberal regimes, authoritarian states often face parallel dynamics. Recent trends illustrate how technocratic encroachment on civil society’s prerogatives can provoke populist backlash. Such cycles can build toward crises by eroding the legitimacy citizens invest in regimes. Surprisingly, by throwing both the need for and limits of expertise into sharp relief, the politics of COVID-19 create a novel opportunity to disrupt these trends. We assess how this opportunity may be unfolding in two crucial cases, the United States and China, and, more briefly, South Korea. We conclude by sketching some theoretical considerations to guide a geographically expanded and temporally extended research agenda on this important opportunity to slow or reverse a trend plaguing modern governance.

Collectives bring people and their concerns together. In the twenty-first century, this assembly happens across different material and virtual spaces that, together, establish connective layers of society. A kind of politics has emerged that seeks new forms of communication and expression and proposes new modes of (co)existence. Riots in the suburbs of metropolitan areas, the repair of a public village centre, railway workers’ strikes, green activists’ protests, songs in support of tsunami victims… These are some examples of collective actions that unite people and places. But very often these kinds of events and social practices take place and fade away too quickly without visible traces of becoming collectives. This article focuses on the contingent spaces that enable collective action and provide possibilities for “peripheral” concerns and communities to become public. The concept of “diasporas” is widened to permit discussion of how emerging (international) communities make their voices heard through political events. Some theoretical concepts will be illustrated, using two examples of collective action on 1 May 2009 that demonstrate different initiatives concerning the global (economic) crisis. Assembling Collectives and Affective Events Building a house/centre and singing for something: these are examples of practices that bring people and their ideals together in a collective action or event. This article discusses the different communities that evolve within spaces that enable collective action. These communities are formed not only on the basis of nationality, occupation, or race; elements of (temporal) membership are created out of a wide spectrum of affiliations and a sense of solidarity. Hinchliffe (13) argues that collective action can be seen as a collection of affects that link together disparate places and times, and thus the collective is a matter of considerable political interest. The emergent spaces of collective action publicise particular concerns that may connect already existing but (spatially) dispersed communities and diasporas. However, there is a need to discuss the affects, places, and temporalities that make the assemblage of new collectivities possible. The political potential of collective spaces needs careful elaboration in order that such initiatives may continue to grow without extending the influence of existing (capitalist) powers. Various communities connected “glocally” (locally and globally) can call new publics into existence, posing questions to politics which are not yet “of politics” (Thrift 3). Thus collective action can invent new connecting concerns and practices that catalyse (political) change in society. To understand the complex spatiality of collective action and community formations, it is crucial to look at processes of “affect”. Affects occur in society as “in-becoming” atmospheres and “imitation-suggestions” (Brennan 1-10) that stimulate concerns and motivate practices. The “imitation” can also be an invention that creatively binds existing know-how and experiences into a local-social context. Thinking about affects within the spaces of collective action provides a challenge to rethink what is referred to simply as the “social”. Massumi (228) argues that such affects are virtual expressions of the actually existing things that embody them; however, affects such as emotions and feelings are also autonomous to the degree that they exceed the particular body within which they are presently confined. The emerging bodies, or spaces, of collective action thus carry the potential to transform coexistence across both intellectual and physical boundaries, and communication technology has been instrumental in linking the affective spaces of collective action across both time and space. According to Thrift, the collision of different space-times very often provokes a “stutter” in social relations: the jolt which arises from new encounters, new connections, new ways of proceeding. But how can these turbulent spheres and trajectories of collective action be described and discussed? Here the mechanisms of “events” themselves need to be addressed. The “event” represents, abstractly, a spatio-temporal locus where different concerns and practices are encountered and negotiated. “Event” refers to an incoming, or emerging, object (agent) triggering, through various affective responses, new ideas and initiatives (Clark 33). In addition to revolutions or tsunamis, there are also smaller-scale events that change how people live and come together. In this sense, events can be understood to combine individual and social “bodies” within collective action and imaginations. As Appadurai has argued, the imagination is central to all forms of agency, is itself a social practice, and is the key component of our new global order (Appadurai 29-30). Flusty (7) argues that the production of the global is as present in our day-to-day thoughts and actions as it is in the mass movement of capital, information, and populations which means that there should be the potential to include more people in the democratic process (Whatmore). This process can be seen to be a defining characteristic of the term cosmopolitics which Thrift describes as: “one of the best hopes for changing our engagement with the political by simply acknowledging that there is more there” (Thrift 189). For many, these hopes are based on a new kind of telematic connectedness, in which tele- and digital communications represent the beginning of a global networked consciousness based on the continuous exchange of ideas, both cognitive and affective. Examples of Events and Collectives Taking Place on 1 May 2009 The first day in May is traditionally dedicated to working people, and there are many public gatherings to express solidarity with workers and left-wing (“red”) policy. Issues concerning work and various productions are complex, and recently the global economic crisis exposed some weaknesses in neoliberal capitalism. Different participatory/collective actions and spaces are formed to make some common concerns public at the same time in various locations. The two following examples are part of wider “ideoscapes” (official state ideologies and counter-ideologies) (see Appadurai) in action that help to illustrate both the workings of twenty-first century global capitalism and the translocal character of the public concern. EuroMayDay One alternative form of collective action is EuroMayDay, which has taken place on May 1 every year since 2001 in several cities across (mainly Western) Europe. For example, in 2006 a total of about 300,000 young demonstrators took part in EuroMayDay parades in 20 EU cities (Wikipedia). The purpose of this political action is “to fight against the widespread precarisation of youth and the discrimination of migrants in Europe and beyond: no borders, no workfare, no precarity!” (EuroMayDay). This manifesto indicates that the aim of the collective action is to direct public attention to the insecure conditions of immigrants and young people across Europe. These groups may be seen to constitute a kind of European “diasporic collective” in which the whole of Europe is figured as a “problem area” in which unemployment, displacement, and (possibly) destitution threaten millions of lives. In this emerging “glocality”, there is a common, and urgent, need to overcome the boundaries of exclusion. Here, the proposed collective body (EuroMayDay) is described as a process for action, thus inviting translocal public participation. The body has active nodes in (Western) Europe (Bremen, Dortmund, Geneva, Hamburg, Hanau, Lisbon, Lausanne, Malaga, Milan, Palermo, Tübingen, Zürich) and beyond (Tokyo, Toronto, Tsukuba). The collective process marks these cities on the map through a webpage offering contacts with each of the “nodes” in the network. On 1 May 2009, May Day events, or parades, took place in all the cities listed above. The “nodes” of the EuroMayDay process prepared posters and activities following some common lines, although collective action had to be performed locally in every city. By way of example, let’s look at how this collective action realised its potential in Berlin, Germany. The posters (EuroMayDay Berlin, "Call") articulate the oppressive and competitive power of capitalism which affects everyone, everyday, like a machine: it constitutes “the permanent crisis”. One’s actual or potential unemployment and/or immigrant status may cause insecurity about the future. There is also a focus on liminal or transitional time, and a call for a new collectivity to overcome oppressive forces from above that protect the interests of the State and the banks. EuroMayDay thus calls for the weaving together of different forms of resistance against a deeply embedded capitalist system and the bringing together of common concerns for the attention of the general public through the May Day parade. Another poster (EuroMayDay Berlin, "May"), depicting the May Day parade, centres around the word “KRISE?” (“crisis”). The poster ends with an optimistic call to action, expressing a desire to free capitalism from institutional oppression and recreate it in a more humanistic way. Together, these two posters represent fragments of the “ideoscope” informing the wider, collective process. In Berlin in 2009, thousands of people (mostly young) participated in the May Day parade (which started from the public square Bebelplatz), backed by a musical soundtrack (see Rudi). Some people also had posters in their hands, displaying slogans like: “For Human Rights”; “Class Struggle”; “Social Change Not Climate Change”; and “Make Capitalism a Thing of the Past”. Simultaneously, dozens of other similar parades were taking place across the cities of Europe, all bearing “accelerated affective hope” (Rosa) for political change and demanding justice in society. Unfortunately, the May Day parade in Berlin took a violent turn at night, when some demonstrators attacked police and set cars on fire. There were also clashes during demonstrations in Hamburg (Kirschbaum). The media blamed the clashes also on the economic recession and recently dashed hopes for change. The Berlin May Day parade event was covered on the EuroMayDay webpage and on television news. This collective action connected many people; some participated in the parade, and many more saw the clashes and burning cars on their screens. The destructive and critical force of the collective action brought attention to some of the problems associated with youth employment and immigration though, sadly, without offering any concrete proposals for a solution to the problem. The emotional character of the street marches, and later the street fighting, were arguably an important aspect of the collective action inasmuch as they demonstrated the potential for citizens to unite, translocally, around affective as well as material grief (a process that has been given dramatic expression in more recent times with events in Egypt, Libya, and Syria). Further, although the recent May Day events have achieved very little in terms of material results, the network remains active, and further initiatives are likely in the future. “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” On 1 May 2009, about 11,000 people participated in a public “thought-bee” in Estonia (located in north-eastern Europe in the region of the Baltic Sea) and (through the Estonian diaspora) abroad. The “thought-bee” can be understood as a civil society initiative designed to bring people together for discussion and problem-solving with regards to everyday social issues. The concept of the “bee” combines work with pleasure. The bee tradition was practised in old Estonian farming communities, when families in adjacent villages helped one another. Bees were often organised for autumn harvesting, and the intense, communal work was celebrated by offering participants food and drink. Similarly, during the Soviet era, on certain Saturdays there were organised days (obligatory) for collective working (e.g. to reconstruct sites or to pick up litter). Now the “bee” concept has become associated with brainstorming in small groups across the country as well as abroad. The number of participants in the May 1st thought-bee was relatively large, given that Estonia’s total population is only 1.4 million. The funding of the initiative combined public and private sources, e.g. Estonian Civil Society Foundation, the European Commission, and some companies. The information sheet, presented to participants of the May 1st thought-bee, explains the event’s purpose in this way: The main purpose of today’s thought-bee is to initiate as many actions as possible that can change life in Estonia for the better. My Estonia, our more enjoyable and more efficient society, will appear through smaller and bigger thoughts. In the thought-bee we think how to make life better for our own home-place... Let’s think together and do it! (Teeme Ära, "Teeme", translated from Estonian) The civil society event grew out of a collective action on 3 May 2008 to pick up and dispose of litter throughout Estonia. The thought-bee initiative was coordinated by volunteers. The emotional appeal to participate in the thought-bee event on May 1st was presented and circulated in newspapers, radio, television, Internet portals, and e-mails. Famous people called on residents to take part in the public discussion events. Some examples of arguments for the collective activity included the economic crisis, the need for new jobs, self-responsibility, environmental pressures, and the general need to learn and find communal solutions. The thought-bee initiative took place simultaneously in about 500 “thought-halls” all over Estonia and abroad. Small groups of people registered, chose main discussion topics (with many suggestions from organisers of the bee) and made their groups visible as nodes on the “initiative” webpage. Other people had the opportunity of reading several proposals from the various thought-halls and of joining as members of the public brainstorming event on 1 May. The virtual and living map of the halls presented them as (green) nodes with location, topics, members, and discussion leaders. Various sites such as schools, clubs, cultural centres, municipality buildings, and theatres became part of the multiple and synchronous “space-times” within the half-day thought-bee event. Participants in the thought-bee were asked to bring their own food to share and, in some municipalities, open concerts were held to celebrate the day. These practices indicate some continuity with the national tradition of bees, where work has always been combined with pleasure. Most “thought-halls” were located in towns and smaller local centres as well as on several Estonian islands. Moreover, these thought-halls provided for both as face-to-face and online encounters. Further, one English-speaking discussion group was organised in Tallinn so that non-Estonian speakers could also participate. However, the involvement of Russian-speaking people in the initiative remained rather limited. It is important to note that these embodied spaces of participation were also to be found outside of Estonia—in Brussels, Amsterdam, Toronto, Oslo, Stockholm, Helsinki, Copenhagen, Prague, Baltimore, New York, and San Diego—and, in this way, the Estonian diaspora was also given the opportunity to become involved in the collective action. Following the theories of Thrift and Clark cited at the beginning of this article, it is interesting to see an event in which simultaneously connected places, embodying multiple voices, becomes part of the communal present with a shared vision of the future. The conclusions of each thought-hall discussion group were recorded on video shortly after the event. These videos were made available on the “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” webpage. The most frequently addressed topics of the thought-bee (in order of importance) were: community activities and collaboration; entrepreneurship and new jobs; education, values; free time and sport; regional development; rural life; and the environment and nature conservation (PRAXIS). The participants of the collective action were aware of the importance of local as well as national initiatives as a catalyst for change. The initiative “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” continued after the events of May Day 2009; people discussed issues and suggested proposals through the “initiative” webpage and supported the continuation of the collective action (Teeme Ära, "Description"). Environmental concerns (e.g. planting trees, reducing noise, and packaging waste) appear as important elements in these imaginings along with associated other practices for the improvement of daily life. It is important to understand the thought-bee event as a part of an emerging collective action that started with a simple litter clean-up and grew, through various other successful local community initiatives, into shared visions for a better future predicated upon the principles of glocality and coexistence. The example indicates that (international) NGOs can apply, and also invent, radical information politics to change the terms of debate in a national context by providing a voice for groups and issues that would otherwise remain unheard and unseen (see also Atkinson and Scurrah 236-44). Conclusions The collective actions discussed above have created new publics and contingent spaces to bring additional questions and concerns into politics. In both cases, the potential of “the event” (as theorised in the introduction of this article) came to the foreground, creating an additional international layer of temporal connectivity between many existing social groups such as unemployed young people or members of a village union. These events were both an “outcome” of, and an attempt to change, the involuntary exclusion of certain “peripheral” groups within the melting pot that the European Union has become. As such, they may be thought of as extending the concept of “diasporas” to include emerging platforms of collective action that aim to make problematic issues visible and multiple voices heard across the wider public. This, in turn, illustrates the need to rethink diasporas in the context of the intensive de-territorialisation of human concerns, “space-times and movement-trajectories yet to (be)come” (Braziel and Mannur 18). Both the examples of collective action discussed here campaigned for “changing the world” through a one-day event and may thus be understood in terms of Rosa’s theory of “social acceleration” (Rosa). This theory shows how both to the “contraction of the present” and the general instability of contemporary life have given rise to a newly affective desire to improve life through an expression of the collective will. Such a tendency can clearly take on far more radical forms as has been recently demonstrated by the mass protests and revolts against autocratic ruling powers in Egypt, Libya, and Syria. In this article, however, cosmopolitics is better understood in terms of the particular skills (most evident in the Estonian case) and affective spheres that mobilised in suggestions to bring about local action and global change. Together, these examples of collective action are part of a wider “ideoscape” (Appadurai) trying to reduce the power of capitalism and of the state by encouraging alternative forms of collective action that are not bound up solely with earning money or serving the state as a “salient” citizen. However, it could be argued that “EuroMayDay” is ultimately a reactionary movement used to highlight the oppressive aspects of capitalism without offering clear alternatives. By contrast, “Let’s Do It! My Estonia” has facilitated interactive public discussion and the practice of local skills that have the power to improve everyday life and the environment in a material and quantifiable way. Such changes in collective action also illustrate the speed and “imitative capacity stimulating expressive interactions” that now characterise everyday life (Thrift). Crucially, both these collective events were achieved through rapid advances in communication technologies in recent times; this technology made it possible to spread know-how as well as feelings of solidarity and social contact across the world. Further research on these fascinating developments in g/local politics is clearly urgently needed to help us better understand the changes in collective action currently taking place. Acknowledgements This research was supported by Estonian Science Foundation grant SF0130008s07 and by the European Union through the European Regional Development Fund (Center of Excellence CECT). References Appadurai, Arjun. “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy.” Theorizing Diaspora: A Reader. Ed. Jana Evans Braziel and Anita Mannur. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 25-48. Atkinson, Jeffrey, and Martin Scurrah. Globalizing Social Justice: The Role of Non-Governmental Organizations in Bringing about Social Change. 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This study is about Confucian humanism as the foundation of human rights and economic ethics. The study covers Korea, Japan and the Republic of China. The main research question lies in how Confucian humanism emerged as an enduring tradition, and how it impacts upon human rights and economic ethics of the three nations on their individual paths towards globalizing civil societies. Research elements are (i) literature review, (ii) focus group discussions and (iii) documentation corroborations. Literature reviews covered scholarly works of East Asia and international scholars. Narrative data were obtained from the focus group discussions. Documentation corroboration complemented the focus group discussions. The study explores the origin of Confucianism and proceeds to examine how the Confucian philosophical tradition gave naissance to Confucian humanism. From Confucian humanism, the thesis proceeds to Confucian governance (ching shih). Alternative political views of more egalitarian Confucian schools such as of Mencius also take up a good part of the governance theme. The role of life long self-cultivation is seen as the foundation of character-building for respective societal roles within Confucian ethics and social ethos. The modern democratic institution of human rights is argued as having emerged from the fertile demo-centric Confucian social psychology, but benefited directly from the Western institutional models. Discussions on the tradition of Confucianism and that of Confucian humanism progress through the important turning points throughout history, i.e., the Classic age of Confucius, the Neo-Confucian reformation, the Practical Learning sub-era of the Neo-Confucian era, and, finally, the contemporary Neo-Confucian. The discussions highlight that the Confucian tradition of 'humanity' that Confucius and his disciples formulated in the Classical age endured through the ages to modernity. They also point to the notion that Confucians pursued their intellectual, moral and aesthetic ideals to the highest possible level through the system of learning, philosophizing, and practicing in the tradition. The Confucian cosmology of the 'human to nature' nexus and the Confucian spirituality of cosmic immanence in the 'self' provide clues to the multi-layer structure of Confucian consciousness of self, selves and the greater self, namely society or the Heaven itself. The Neo-Confucian school of 'mind and heart' learning reinforced the inquiry into selves in nexus to nature and the universe. Religious tolerance and the adaptability of Confucianism have stood out as important qualities in the globalization of East-Asian values and ethos, i.e., Confucian 'souls and decorum.' Japan, as an island nation with a unique perception of its self-identity, employs Confucianism, still considered fundamentally as the philosophy of China, to reinforce the national identity without compromising the integrity of the Japanese tradition and sensitivity. Japanese aesthetic sensitivity would place aesthetic unity with nature on equal footing with that of moral unity with the world. Secularism and spirituality of Confucianism benefited from the peaceful co-existence amongst the three great philosophical traditions of Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The thesis as an inquiry into Confucian humanism as a living tradition concludes by answering the main research question and its three associated postulates.

Russia and China took fundamentally different approaches to authoritarian rule beginning in the 1980s. But there is another dimension to the divide of the 1980s that has rendered. Chinese and Russian authoritarianisms increasingly similar: their common embrace of globalization. Both regimes established statist versions of globalization that seek to contain the impact of external influences and global fluctuations even while integrating into the global economic system. Even while globalizing, both have engaged in similar efforts to regulate their civil societies, cut them off from external sources of support, inoculate citizens against foreign ideas, and utilize globalization to their advantage. In their congruent handling of the challenges posed by globalization, Chinese and Russian authoritarianism may in fact be converging toward common forms of domination that render the institutional differences between competitive and non-competitive forms of authoritarianism moot.