Cosmopolitan Civil Societies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

Cosmopolitan Society and its Enemies

Kazuma Matoba — 2024-03-28

Since the end of the Cold War, the world has not abandoned ‘the dream of cosmopolitan peace’ (Alexander 2005). The adjective ‘cosmopolitan’ refers to the political and philosophical concept that all human beings are members of a single community. In the 21st century, however, the world faces a stark reality that is far from this vision, one which is consumed by an epidemic of social inequality and global injustice. The refugee crisis, climate injustice, racism, nationalism, terrorism, and other challenges are rooted in serious, untreated historical traumata which ultimately can lead to a collective form of amnesia related to these respective histories. I argue that to build a resilient, cosmopolitan society requires giving voice and expression to the narratives of victims of perpetration. And, equally important is to disclose the hidden intention in the historical narratives voiced by perpetrators. Through the exploration of these narratives, I argue, citizens will begin to wake up from their historical amnesia.

Home As a Mobile and Flexible Domestic Space in Amitav Ghosh’s Alternative Ideas of Cosmopolitanism

Arnab Das — 2024-03-28

In this globalized cosmopolitan world, the concept of home has become one of the most crucial socio-cultural perceptions, playing a significant role in establishing community and transnational relationships both at the local and the global level. Amitav Ghosh’s alternative ideas of cosmopolitanism are committed to criticizing the neo-imperial characteristic of the contemporary capitalist cosmopolitan world. This paper argues that Amitav Ghosh through his selected fiction - The Shadow Lines (1988) and The Hungry Tide (2004) - has shown how breaking away from the conventional, constrictive ideas and established definitions of home, that often run the risk of becoming the birthplace of many of the communal, regional or national fanatic ideologies, contributes to forming alternative ideas of home and family that are more mobile and flexible in nature and how they are instrumental in shaping individuals as true cosmopolitans.

Practice of Patriotism, Ethnocentrism, Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in India: An Interrogation

Debal SinghaRoy — 2024-03-28

The central concern of this paper is to examine intersectionalities between the ideals of cosmopolitanism, patriotism, ethnocentrism and nationalism in general, and their changing facets and interfaces in India. It argues that being a multiethnic and plural society, the civilisational ethos of India is conventionally founded on cosmopolitanism. The practice of patriotism and its accommodative principle of unity in diversity have provided the building blocks to this cosmopolitanism. During India’s independence struggle these ideals encountered the forces of modernism, ethnocentrism, communalism and ethno-nationalism. In contemporary India the forces of economic neoliberalism, developmental imbalances and persisting social and economic inequalities, post modernism, hyper modernism, populism, and cultural politics have become part of social reality. Notwithstanding the prevalence of the ideals of cosmopolitanism and civilisational interactive processes, these encounters have brought cumulative fluidity in the social, economic and political orientations in contemporary society, and have created further space for the influence of ethnocentrism and cultural politics as a means to remain rooted in society.

Strategic Cosmopolitanism: Chinese Female Jadeite Live Streamers in Ruili

Mingyue Yang — 2024-03-28

With China's construction of free trade zones and the development of digital technology, immigrants from Myanmar and internal migrants from all parts of China have gathered in Ruili, a cross-border hub connecting the two countries. As a result of these mobilities it has been transformed into a grass-roots level cosmopolitan area. Through six years of fieldwork, this study found that grassroots female live streamers who were excluded from mainstream metropolises gained more opportunities for survival and development in jadeite cross-border trade activities in Ruili through the concepts of female entrepreneurship and everyday strategic cosmopolitanism The notion of strategic cosmopolitanism refers to non-elite openness as a strategic response to economic, employment or career advancements generated by policies, discursively presented as economic cosmopolitanism. The increase in economic gains for some has significantly improved their socio-economic status, while at the same time paying the price of being locked in the logic and rules of capitalism.

Cosmopolitan Paradox? The Labour Market Experiences of Newcomer Skilled Workers

Christina Gabriel — 2024-03-28

Canada’s national narratives gesture to cosmopolitan ideals by celebrating the country as open and inclusive through the working of its immigration policy. Indeed, it has been suggested that Canada may be oriented toward a form of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. This vision stands at odds with the experiences of skilled migrants who often encounter hurdles in the labour market. In this paper, we probe the ‘cosmopolitan paradox’ and its implications. Through a qualitative case study of 36 skilled newcomers, we document their experiences as they attempt to enter the labour market encountering barriers that reassert national frames and ‘Canadian standards’. We argue that if Canada is to live up to the promise of a cosmopolitan ideal, the stratifications and exclusions that mark the lives of newcomers need to be addressed. It is not enough to attract increasing numbers of immigrants if they cannot become full members of the Canadian national community.

Capital’s Preference for Foreign African Labour in South Africa: Reflections on Liberal Anti-xenophobia Research

Greg Ruiters — 2024-03-28

In South Africa, in many economic sectors, foreign blacks are more likely to get a job than a similarly skilled black South African. This paper is about why employers prefer foreign African labour in South Africa, how this contributes to seeing South African black workers as inferior and how job hoarding networks in employment niches have emerged. We examine this in the context of literature on ‘xenophobia’. Both discursive and material practices of racist-ethnicist employers are significant. In a new hierarchy of fictive labour imaginaries which reflects a new labour ‘frontier’ in a diversified post-apartheid southern African pool. The new frontier reflects neoliberal flexible labour systems which also operate within a human rights free-market framework.

Diversionary Post-Coal Politics in South Africa: A Chinese Solar-Powered Industrial Zone Controversy

Patrick Bond — 2024-03-28

In September 2021 at a United Nations climate summit in New York, Xi Jinping announced that there would be no further Chinese coal-fired power plants along the Belt and Road Initiative, which stretches as far as South Africa. Instead, the Chinese operator of South Africa’s single largest Special Economic Zone proposal – in rural Makhado – and his local allies suggested that solar power could supply energy for the $10 billion project, including high-emissions industrial projects. This raised the question of whether firms engaged in mining, smelting, processing and other carbon-intensive activities would pick ‘low-hanging fruits’ within the renewable energy sector (instead of that power going into the grid for broader consumption). Their incentive is to do so, in order to safeguard the so-called Minerals-Energy Complex from Western climate sanctions – threatened, on grounds of high CO₂-inputs to export products including steel, aluminium and petrochemicals. In spite of a 2022 United Nations Development Programme endorsement of the project, social and environmental resistance has intensified, but the introduction of solar power for high-emissions metal manufacturing presents a special challenge. Two techniques associated with ecological modernisation – natural capital accounting and the Social Cost of Carbon – may prove relevant to civil society critics of ‘extractivism’, in shifting the narrative further across space, time and scale.