Genuine powers, the powers that decide the range of life options and life chances of most of our contemporaries, have evaporated from the nation state into the global space, where they float free from political control: politics has remained as local as before and therefore is no longer able to reach them, let alone to constrain. One of the effects of globalisation is the divorce between power (the capacity to have things done) and politics. We have now power freed from politics in the global space, and politics deprived of power in the local space.

How can we combat this ultimate insult to democracy – the removal of power itself from the arena of national politics? I’m interested in hearing what people think. It seems to me to be a devilish problem – “global civil society” – usually assimilated to NGOs has its own problems of legitimacy, and enormous energy needs to go into electoral contests at the national level to defend what can be salvaged from a political horizon seemingly endlessly moving rightward. At the same time, and this is an issue feminism as a social movement has grappled with, there are huge problems of coordination and respect for different lived experience in orchestrating action and translating thought across borders.

What is to be done?

Elsewhere: SocProf offers her thoughts at The Global Sociology Blog.