![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
Cosmopolitans call for the creation of a global legal order based around the principle of universal human rights. It is, therefore, somewhat surprising that cosmopolitans have not adequately addressed the issue of how such a global order would be policed. The emergence of stable legal systems has generally coincided with the development of formal and informal methods of policing that function to enforce legal entitlements and maintain societal order. This suggests that the issue of policing should be addressed if cosmopolitanism is to be defended as a desirable and realistic project for reforming the global order. This paper proposes that policing within a cosmopolitan legal order should be conceptualized as a form of societal peacekeeping, which functions to maintain the conditions necessary for the enjoyment of human rights. It rejects the idea of a unitary global police force modelled on the professional agencies established by the modern state, in favour of a plural approach that calls for cosmopolitan policing functions to be discharged by a variety of actors. The account developed here does not resolve all the complex issues surrounding the role of policing within a reformed global order, but has the modest goal of raising an issue for cosmopolitanism which has hitherto been neglected.
Notes
1 J. Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society,” in Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 312–52.
2 D. Held, Democracy and the Global Order (Cambridge: Polity, 1995), 267–86.
3 J. Bohman, “Cosmopolitan Republicanism,” The Monist 84.1 (2001), 3.
4 I. Loader and N. Walker, “Policing as a Public Good: Reconstituting the Connections Between Policing and the State,” Theoretical Criminology 5.9 (2001): 9–35.
5 There is a sense in which cosmopolitans are merely following a broader trend within contemporary political philosophy, which tends to give far less attention to policing than other aspects of criminal justice. This trend is discussed and challenged in I. Loader, “In Search of Civic Policing: Recasting the ‘Peelian’ Principles,” Criminal Law and Philosophy (2014) http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11572-014-9318-1.
6 R. Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.
7 M. Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organised Violence in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), 124.
8 Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society,” 314.
9 D. Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens: Toward Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 184–205.
10 The latter goal indicates that cosmopolitan law enforcement requires transnational or global courts, in addition to police agents. Discussion of the judicial aspect can be found in Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, 165–71.
11 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 125.
12 Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society,” 339 (emphasis in original).
13 Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 3.
14 J. Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 23.
15 R. V. Ericson, Crime in an Insecure World (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 29.
16 Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, 202.
17 Kaldor, New and Old Wars, 125.
18 U. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision, trans. C. Cronin (Cambridge: Polity, 2006), 161.
19 Loader, “In Search of Civic Policing,” 1.
20 Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, 27–29.
21 A cosmopolitan analysis of the relationship between human rights and a certain conception of human flourishing can be found in M. C. Nussbaum, “Capabilities and Human Rights,” Fordham Law Review 66.2 (1997): 273–300.
22 Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, 28.
23 Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, 28.
24 Kleinig, The Ethics of Policing, 29.
25 The claim here is not that the goal of social peacekeeping is unique to cosmopolitan policing. It is possible that social peacekeeping, or an analogous concept, is a normative goal that should guide policing in any and all contexts. The following two principles contain ideas that are perhaps more distinctive to cosmopolitan (or global) policing, particularly the acceptance of subsidiarity and the rejection of a professionalized global police force.
26 The principle of subsidiarity as a normative component of global governance is discussed in A. Slaughter, A New World Order (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 255–7.
27 On this distinction, see Loader and Walker, “Policing as a Public Good,” 14.
28 Reiner, The Politics of the Police, 1–2.
29 M. Kaldor, Global Civil Society: An Answer to War (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), 128–36.
30 A. Crawford, “The Pattern of Policing in the UK: Policing Beyond the Police,” in Handbook of Policing, ed. T. Newburn (Portland, OR: Willan, 2003), 136–68 (136).
31 M. Castells, The Power of Identity, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 321–3.
32 N. Walker, “The Pattern of Transnational Policing,” in Handbook of Policing, ed. T. Newburn (Portland, OR: Willan, 2003), 111–35 (111).
33 M. Rowe, Introduction to Policing, 2nd ed. (London: Sage, 2014), 182. There are certainly important differences between commercial actors whose principal goal is profit-making and civil society actors whose principal goal is advocacy or charitable work. Nonetheless, they both can be classed as “private” in the sense given in the text, and it is helpful to keep the typology of actors involved in cosmopolitan policing as simple as possible.
34 Walker, “The Pattern of Transnational Policing,” 128–9.
35 The cosmopolitan theory defended by Jürgen Habermas, for instance, rejects the idea that the institutional arrangements of the European Union could be replicated at a global level. His main reason for this is that the level of political and economic integration present in the European Union requires a sense of common identity and a shared public culture which, in his view, cannot be replicated at the global level. Habermas instead defends a form of cosmopolitan society dispersed across the three spatial levels of national governments, regional or continental regimes, and a supranational authority modelled on the UN (Habermas, “A Political Constitution for the Pluralist World Society,” 322–7).
36 Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens, 153–83.
37 D. A. Zach, D. C. Seyle and J. V. Madsen, Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance: A Study of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (Broomfield, CO: Oceans Beyond Piracy, 2013).
38 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 32.
39 D. Guilfoyle, “Prosecuting Pirates: The Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia, Governance and International Law,” Global Policy 4.1 (2013): 73–9 (74).
40 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 18.
41 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 35–6.
42 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 26.
43 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 25.
44 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 24.
45 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 21–2.
46 Zach et al., Burden-Sharing Multi-Level Governance, 38–9.
47 The arguments of this paper thus share a certain sensibility with the work of the late Ulrich Beck in Cosmopolitan Vision, which associates cosmopolitanism with modes of organization and thinking that transform categories associated with a national or statist perspective. For a sympathetic but critical commentary on this take on cosmopolitanism, see W. Smith, “A Cosmopolitan Sociology: Ulrich Beck's Trilogy on the Global Age,” Global Networks 8.2 (2008): 253–9.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
William Smith
William Smith is Associate Professor in the Department of Government and Public Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research is in contemporary political theory, with a focus on issues related to deliberative democracy, civil disobedience and international political thought. He is the author of Civil Disobedience and Deliberative Democracy (London: Routledge, 2013) and articles published in Ethics & International Affairs, Journal of Political Philosophy, Political Studies, Politics and Society and Review of International Studies.