Competing Autonomy Claims and the Changing Grammar of Global Politics

Abstract

This article argues that contending ideas about autonomy lie behind current discourses of human rights, claims to nation-state and cultural autonomy, and democracy promotion. Globalizing processes are bringing these contested understandings of autonomy, and their often silent framing within assumptions about sovereignty, into a new prominence. Locating itself within agonistic views of autonomy and politics, the article argues that it is necessary to pay closer attention to the perspectives that feminist and postcolonial analyses bring to understanding how autonomy, community, culture, and nation are co-constructed within imaginaries, such as liberal multiculturalism, that are no longer adequate to current demands for justice. To succeed, this renewed attention needs to locate itself within an effort to rethink academic community and the research protocols and collaborative practices this community permits and legitimizes.

Este artículo sostiene que las ideas contendientes sobre la autonomía yacen detrás de las disertaciones actuales sobre los derechos humanos, las declaraciones de nación-estado y autonomía cultural y la promoción de la democracia. Los procesos de globalización están conduciendo estos entendimientos contradictorios de autonomía y sus encuadramientos generalmente silenciosos, dentro de las suposiciones sobre la soberanía, a un nuevo nivel de importancia. Este artículo que se ubica a sí mismo bajo una perspectiva ardua de autonomía y política, argumenta que es necesario poner mayor atención a las perspectivas que traen los análisis feministas y postcoloniales para entender cómo la autonomía, la comunidad, la cultura y la nación se han co-construído de manera imaginaria, tales como el multiculturalismo liberal que ya no son adecuadas para las demandas actuales de justicia. Para lograr el éxito, esta atención renovada debe situarse dentro de un esfuerzo para replantear a la comunidad académica, los protocolos de investigación y las prácticas colaborativas que esta comunidad permite y legaliza.

Keywords:

• culture
• feminism
• postcolonialism
• human rights
• democracy
• community
• nation

Acknowledgments

This article has been deeply influenced by the ‘Globalization and Autonomy’ collaboration led by William Coleman and supported by a Major Collaborative Research Initiative grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. It links to William Coleman and Diana Brydon (eds) Renegotiating Community: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Global Contexts (Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2008). It also draws on research into national and global imaginaries supported by the Canada Research Chairs Program. An earlier version of the paper was delivered at the Globalization Studies Network meetings at the Centre for International Governance Innovation, University of Waterloo, in August 2008.