What does it mean?The Conceptualising Global Democracy (CGD) project starts from the observation that a principal difficulty in building democratic governance of global affairs is a general lack of clarity regarding what ‘rule by and for the people’ means in the context of a more global world. What principles and practices would, could and should apply when handling global problems?
More specifically, the CGD project explores questions such as who are ‘the people’ when it comes to global affairs? What are the processes through which rule ‘by and for’ the people are achieved in global politics? Are traditional models of democracy applicable to the regulation of global issues? Or do notions of democracy need to be reformulated? If so, in what ways and how extensively do notions of democracy need to be reconceived?
To address these questions the CGD project asked innovative (global) democracy authors from the ten world regions to set out their ideas of what democracy could mean when applied to global affairs. The authors brought highly diverse perspectives to the issue of conceptualising global democracy, including Austronesian culture, Confucian philosophy, feminism, Gandhian views, Islam, postcolonialism, post-communist socialism, and western liberalism.
To ensure that the CGD project did not transpire in an academic cocoon 20 practitioners from civil society and official circles were invited to act as primary discussants of and advisers to the authors at the project workshop held in Cairo and after. Both authors and discussants comprise diversity of age, gender and race.
The CGD project seeks to broaden discussions on global democracy to include the views of different cultures, ages, classes, genders and races and generate intellectually provocative and politically effective new ideas about the meaning of global democracy.
More specifically, the project aims to:
BGD has produced several publications on the meaning of global democracy.
These include:
What does it mean to speak of 'global democracy'?Summarising the key findings of our international workshop in Cairo
Your life is global! – Action ToolkitProviding tools for you to develop your own ideas of global democracy
GLOBAL perspectives on GLOBAL democracyHighlighting the keys ideas presented in the authors papers
Most of our publications are available in: العربية , 简体中文 , English, Español , Français , हिन्दी, Português and Русский
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