The Politics of the Governed: Alter-Globalization and Subalternity

Lecture Series "Beyond Anarchy: Rule and Authority in the International System"

Prof. Nikita Dhawan, Cluster of Excellence "The Formation of Normative Orders"

23 October 2013, 6.15pm
Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main
Campus Westend, Hörsaalzentrum HZ 1

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Abstract
Unequal access to power and uneven distribution of resources in the current phase of postcolonial late capitalism has spurred a range of critical discourses and movements that seek to reconfigure global hierarchies. Free-market globalization has led to the systematic dismantling of accountability of the state, which is increasingly taking on a managerial role. Ironically, the loss of legitimacy of the state has opened up new opportunities of action for the international civil society, which is increasingly at the helm of global governance. Enjoying a high level of legitimacy in the public sphere, international organizations are increasingly entrusted with the task of globally monitoring issues of justice, peace and democracy. My talk interrogates the vanguardism of extra-state collective action and the state-phobic politics of the feudally benevolent alter-globalization lobby, who have become organic intellectuals of global capitalism. The focus will be on subaltern groups, who can neither access organs of the state nor transnational counterpublics. I will examine the limits and lures of cosmopolitan politics in a postcolonial world by exploring the discontinuity between those who “right wrongs” from above and those below who are wronged.

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Nikita Dhawan is Junior Professor of Political Science for Gender/Postcolonial Studies, Cluster of Excellence “The Formation of Normative Orders”, Goethe University Frankfurt. She has held visiting fellowships at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities, The University of Melbourne, Australia; Program of Critical Theory, University of California, Berkeley, USA; University of La Laguna, Tenerife, Spain; Pusan National University, South Korea; Columbia University, New York, USA. Her publications include Impossible Speech: On the Politics of Silence and Violence (2007) and Decolonizing Enlightenment: Transnational Justice, Human Rights and Democracy in a Postcolonial World (ed., 2013).

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