Universal Politics

In Universal Politics, Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua argue for a negative universality rooted in social antagonism (i.e., shared experiences of exploitation and marginalization). They examine what a universal politics might look like today in the context of key global sites of struggle, including climate change, workers' struggles, the Palestinian question, the refugee crisis, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Political Islam, the Bolivian state under Morales, theEuropean Union, and COVID-19.

In Universal Politics, Ilan Kapoor and Zahi Zalloua argue that, in the face of the relentless advance of global capitalism, a universal politics is needed today more than ever. But rather than appealing to the narrow particularism of identity politics, the authors argue for a negative universality rooted in social antagonism (i.e., shared experiences of exploitation and marginalization). This conception of shared struggle avoids the trap of a neocolonial universalism, while foregrounding the politics of the systematically dispossessed and excluded. The book examines what a universal politics might look like in the context of key current global sites of struggle, including climate change, workers' struggles, the Palestinian question, the refugee crisis, Black Lives Matter, #MeToo, Political Islam, the Bolivian state under Morales, the European Union, and COVID-19. It also discusses the main political ingredients, gaps, and limitations of a universal politics.

“All too often,” wrote disabled architect Ronald Mace, “designers don’t take the needs of disabled and elderly people into account.” Building Access investigates twentieth-century strategies for designing the world with disability in mind. Commonly understood in terms of curb cuts, automatic doors, Braille signs, and flexible kitchens, Universal Design purported to create a built environment for everyone, not only the average citizen. But who counts as “everyone,” Aimi Hamraie asks, and how can designers know? Blending technoscience studies and design history with critical disability, race, and feminist theories, Building Access interrogates the historical, cultural, and theoretical contexts for these questions, offering a groundbreaking critical history of Universal Design. Hamraie reveals that the twentieth-century shift from “design for the average” to “design for all” took place through liberal political, economic, and scientific structures concerned with defining the disabled user and designing in its name. Tracing the co-evolution of accessible design for disabled veterans, a radical disability maker movement, disability rights law, and strategies for diversifying the architecture profession, Hamraie shows that Universal Design was not just an approach to creating new products or spaces, but also a sustained, understated activist movement challenging dominant understandings of disability in architecture, medicine, and society. Illustrated with a wealth of rare archival materials, Building Access brings together scientific, social, and political histories in what is not only the pioneering critical account of Universal Design but also a deep engagement with the politics of knowing, making, and belonging in twentieth-century United States.

Montesquieu's liberalism and critique of universalism in politics, often thought to stand in tension, comprise a coherent philosophical and political project.

William Desmond sees religion, art, philosophy, and politics as essential and distinctive modes of human practice, manifestations of an intimate universality that illuminates individual and social being. They are also surprisingly permeable phenomena, and by observing their relations, Desmond captures notes of a clandestine conversation that transforms ontology.

Essential reading for every American who must navigate the US health care system. Why was the Obama health plan so controversial and difficult to understand? In this readable, entertaining, and substantive book, Stuart Altman—internationally recognized expert in health policy and adviser to five US presidents—and fellow health care specialist David Shactman explain not only the Obama health plan but also many of the intriguing stories in the hundred-year saga leading up to the landmark 2010 legislation. Blending political intrigue, policy substance, and good old-fashioned storytelling, this is the first book to place the Obama health plan within a historical perspective. The authors describe the sometimes haphazard, piece-by-piece construction of the nation’s health care system, from the early efforts of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman to the later additions of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. In each case, they examine the factors that led to success or failure, often by illuminating little-known political maneuvers that brought about immense shifts in policy or thwarted herculean efforts at reform. The authors look at key moments in health care history: the Hill–Burton Act in 1946, in which one determined poverty lawyer secured the rights of the uninsured poor to get hospital care; the "three-layer cake" strategy of powerful House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills to enact Medicare and Medicaid under Lyndon Johnson in 1965; the odd story of how Medicare catastrophic insurance was passed by Ronald Reagan in 1988 and then repealed because of public anger in 1989; and the fact that the largest and most expensive expansion of Medicare was enacted by George W. Bush in 2003. President Barack Obama is the protagonist in the climactic chapter, learning from the successes and failures chronicled throughout the narrative. The authors relate how, in the midst of a worldwide financial meltdown, Obama overcame seemingly impossible obstacles to accomplish what other presidents had tried and failed to achieve for nearly one hundred years.

""Crimes against humanity" has become integral to contemporary political and legal discourse. The conceptual core of the term - an act offending against all of mankind -, however, runs deep in the history in international political thought. In an original excavation of this history, The Politics of Universal Crime examines theoretical mobilizations of the idea of "universal crime" in colonial and post-colonial contexts. The book demonstrates the overlooked centrality of humanity and criminality to political liberalism's historical engagement with world politics, thereby breaking with the exhaustively studied status of individual rights in liberal thought. It is argued that invocations of universal crime project humanity as a normatively integrated, yet minimally inclusive and hierarchically structured subject. Such visions of humanity have in turn underwritten justifications of foreign rule and outsider intervention based on claims to an injury universally suffered by all mankind. The study foregrounds the "political productivity" of universal crime that entails distinct figures, relationships and forms of authority and agency. The book traces this argument through European political theorists' deployments of universal crime in assessing the legitimacy of colonial rule and foreign intervention in non-European societies. Analyzing John Locke's notion of universal crime in the context of English colonialism, the concept's retooled circulation during the nineteenth century and contemporary cosmopolitanism's reliance on 'crimes against humanity', it identifies an 'inclusionary Eurocentrism' that subtends the authorizing and coercive dimensions of universal crime. Unlike much-studied 'exclusionary Eurocentrist' thinking, 'inclusionary Eurocentrist' arguments have historically extended an unequal, repressive 'recognition via liability' to non-European peoples"--

This book examines discourses of rights and practices of resistance in post-conflict societies, exploring the interaction between the international human rights framework and different actors seeking political and social change. Presenting detailed new case studies from Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka and Kosovo, it reveals the necessity of social scientific interventions in the field of human rights. The author shows how a shift away from the realm of normative political or legal theory towards a more sociological analysis promises a better understanding of both the limits of current human rights approaches and possible sites of potential. Considering the diverse ways in which human rights are enacted and mobilised, The Socio-Political Practice of Human Rights engages with major sites of tension and debate, examining the question of whether human rights are universal or culturally relative; their relationship to forms of economic and political domination; the role of law as a mechanism for social change and the ways in which the language of human rights facilitates or closes sites of radical resistance. By situating these debates in specific contexts, this book concludes by proposing new ways of theorizing human rights. Empirically grounded and offering an alternate framework for understanding the fluid and ambiguous operation of power within the theory and practice of human rights, this volume will appeal to scholars of sociology, law and politics with interests in gender, resistance, international law, human rights and socio-legal discourse.