Conflicts of the Global State

ABSTRACT

Global conflicts, be they economic, political, cultural, or military ones, are big challenges in the age of world interactions. The article concentrates on conflicts and dangers of the future possible global state which can be the result of the current development of global capitalism. It tries to capture to the greatest possible extent these integrating trends, not only in order to clarify their shape and potentials over last recent decades, but also to show the thematic areas of the developmental processes of global conflicts. There is a need to deal with potential global tendencies in the form of planetary homogenisation, supranational authoritarian tendencies, and a world war, and to formulate possible normative solutions to these by a multi-level arrangement (local, national, macro-regional, and global levels). The article stresses that the analysis of negative and positive aspects of the global state presupposes its complex critical concept. It articulates the basis for a critical theory of (mis)recognition of the global state. In the end, the article indicates how, in the conflict zones and peripheries, the global poor as a potential new subject of social change can contribute to the positive development and solutions to the conflicts and dangers.

KEYWORDS:

• Global state
• global capitalism
• conflicts
• critical theory
• recognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Marek Hrubec is Director of the Centre of Global Studies and also of the Department of Moral and Political Philosophy in the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech Academy of Sciences. He teaches at Charles University in Prague. In 2014 and 2015, he was Head of East Africa Star University. He has published on social and political justice, global conflicts, intercultural dialogue, development and the global poor. His main book is From Misrecognition to Justice: A Critical Theory of Global Society and Politics (in Czech, 2011). The last book (with N. de Oliveira, E. Sobottka, and G. Saavedra) is Justice and Recognition (2015). He has lectured in many countries including in the European Union, the United States, China, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Iran, India, Vietnam, New Zealand, etc.

Notes

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If we are to avoid mass-suicide, we must have our world state quickly and this probably means that we must have it in a non-democratic form to begin with. We will have to start building a world state now on the best design that is practicable at the moment. (Toynbee 1962)