According to Robert Talisse, ‘we have sufficient epistemological reasons to be democrats’ and these reasons support democracy even when we are tempted to doubt the legitimacy of democratic government. As epistemic agents, we care about the truth of our beliefs, and have reasons to want to live in an environment conducive to forming and acting on true, rather than false, beliefs. Democracy, Talisse argues, is the best means to provide such an environment. Hence, he concludes that epistemic agency, correctly understood, supports the legitimacy of democracy. This reply highlights the interest, but also the difficulties, of this argument and, in particular, of its assumptions about epistemic agency, morality and democracy.
James Rule is puzzled by the ‘idiosyncratic’ approach that I take to the philosophical study of privacy. As evidence for this idiosyncracy, he cites my relative indifference to the distinction between consequentialist and deontological perspectives on privacy although these differences are proof of ‘intricate, yet enormously consequential intellectual tensions’. My choice of philosophical topics is ‘unsystematic’ and more a reflection of my own ‘intellectual hobby-horses’ than a ‘well-worked-out view of what students most need to know’. Finally, Rule concludes, because ‘the most important privacy questions are excruciating’, we need ‘more systematic guidance than is provided here’. I am grateful to the editors for the chance to respond to these complaints.
Global forest governance is generally analyzed as highly fragmented, meaning that it involves a multiplicity of actors and institutions. This fragmentation may be one explanation of the proliferation of multiple discourses around forest governance produced by some dominant actors. In this context, community forestry organizations are seeking, through their association in the form of transnational self-help networks, to promote alternative discourses around their own model of communitarian governance. These recent experiences question the traditional concepts and approaches that only consider community forestry organizations at the local scale. Based on a transnational political sociology perspective and on concrete experiences from Mesoamerica, this paper aims to present an innovative analytical framework to understand how transnational self-help networks of community forestry contribute to transform norms of forest governance through their discourses. It aims in particular to capture the mechanisms leading to the translation of norms between scales and the production of discourse coalitions within the network. The goal is finally to consider transnational self-help networks of community forestry as full-fledged actors within global forest governance, with the capacity to transform the nature of key norms of governance, particularly those directly affecting their own model.
Alors que la gouvernance mondiale de l'environnement se trouve actuellement dans une phase d'ouverture vers les acteurs de la société civile, la compréhension de leur rôle dans la production des normes environnementales reste incomplète. Pourtant, ces acteurs, tels que les ONG mais aussi les réseaux transnationaux d'organisations de la société civile, occupent une place privilégiée dans ces processus entre demande de régulation internationale et respect des réalités locales. La gouvernance des biens communs, tel que l'eau, illustre particulièrement bien les tensions existantes dans la production des normes entre les différents acteurs et échelles d'action. Cet article vise à analyser la place des réseaux transnationaux autogérés dans la production des normes de gouvernance environnementale, à travers le cas d'un réseau latino-américain regroupant des organisations communautaires de l'eau, et son rôle dans la construction d'une norme transnationale sur l'« associativité ». Il s'agit de comprendre en quoi la production de cette nouvelle norme est le fruit de multiples processus de circulation transnationale et de traduction, effectués par des acteurs centraux au sein du réseau. Pour cela, cet article se base d'une part sur un cadre théorique novateur croisant théorie constructiviste et sociologie de la traduction, et d'autre part sur des observations directes et entretiens avec les acteurs du réseau.
This thesis analyzes the public discourse on foreigners and Muslims in Switzerland between 2000 and 2009. In Switzerland, as elsewhere in Europe, the debate on immigration, cultural identity and citizenship seems to focus more and more on the Muslim minority. While the Muslim population belonged to the generic group of foreigners in the public debate until recently, it seems that Muslims have become the main problem for integration in Switzerland. In the past decade, two direct democratic campaigns targeted Muslims, raising the question about the compatibility of Swiss and Muslim cultures. What makes Muslims a special group? How does the public discourse on Muslims differ from the portrayal of foreigners in general? Are Muslims perceived as the main threat to Swiss culture and gender equality? To answer these questions empirically, a quantitative content analysis of four major Swiss newspapers was conducted covering three direct democratic campaigns in the last decade. The aim of the analysis was to inductively grasp the discourse of institutional actors on Muslims and on foreigners in general and to discover the main similarities and differences between how these two categories are depicted. While the demographic composition of the Muslim minority has not changed much in the last decade, the way Muslims are perceived in public discourse did. While certain ethnic groups were still categorized as foreigners in 2000, they are more often assigned to the Muslim minority in 2009. The latter, even though of heterogeneous composition, is seen as a more and more homogeneous group causing problems in other fields than foreigners do. This change in discourse should lead to question the current academic and political debate on integration in Switzerland.
Ce mémoire traite de l’impact des clivages sur le choix partisan en Suisse lors des élections fédérales de 1995 à 2003, en particulier du clivage entre les gagnants et les perdants de la mondialisation et du clivage de classe traditionnel. L'analyse porte à la fois sur l'évolution de cet impact dans le temps (entre 1995 et 2003) et par type de système de partis cantonaux (cantons alémaniques mixtes, cantons romands mixtes et cantons catholiques). Il montre que le clivage entre gagnants et perdants de la globalisation devient toujours plus important pour le choix partisan, et spécialement avec sa dimension normative "ouverture-traditions", en Suisse mais aussi dans les trois types de systèmes de partis cantonaux.
Wenn man von der Sozialdemokratie als Arbeiterpartei spricht, so sind damit zwei, eng zusammenhängende, aber doch unterschiedliche Aspekte gemeint: Erstens, dass die SP die politische Interessenvertreterin der Lohnarbeiterinnen und Lohnarbeiter ist. Zweitens, dass die Mitglieder, sowie die Wählerinnen und Wähler der SP überwiegend Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter sind und dass Arbeiterinnen und Arbeiter überwiegend SP wählen.
