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In place of the liberal account of civil disobedience as a guardian of basic rights, this article develops a deliberative approach that associates the justification and role of this form of protest with the public sphere of a democratic society. The deliberative theory takes its lead from those who pursue a broadly democratic defence of civil disobedience, but attempts to avoid some of the shortcomings that afflict such approaches. The first section of the article considers one such approach, namely the republican defence of civil disobedience proposed recently by Daniel Markovits. This theory constitutes a novel alternative to liberal accounts of civil disobedience, but is vulnerable to important objections. The second section aims to avoid these difficulties by proceeding from a deliberative, rather than a republican, conception of democracy. It introduces the central idea of the public sphere as a network of forums within which citizens engage in deliberation about issues of common concern. Civil disobedience is defended as a mechanism for publicising issues that, because of the stifling effects of prevailing orthodoxies, receive insufficient attention in the public sphere. The third section develops the deliberative theory of civil disobedience by way of defending it against three important objections. The discussion draws to a close by considering some wider implications of defending civil disobedience as a guardian of the public sphere. Adapted from the source document.

The aim of this article is to contribute to the elaboration of a deliberative approach to global institutional design. A deliberative approach aims to embed processes of mutual reason-giving at the heart of international relations and global decision-making. The theoretical framework that orientates this discussion is the liberal approach to international law developed by John Rawls. It may seem strange to invoke this model: after all, Rawls does not specifically discuss the issue of global institutional design and indeed has been widely criticized for neglecting this topic. In fact, in its account of global public reason, Rawls's approach can be shown to contain important and surprisingly neglected resources for constructing a dynamic and inclusive theory of global deliberative politics.

This article examines Hannah Arendt's bold and provocative proposal to institutionalize civil disobedience. First, I argue that the proposal follows from Arendt's peculiar interpretation of this mode of protest. She sees it as an unexpected yet welcome echo of the revolutionary spirit that accompanied the foundation of the American republic. In seeking to bring civil disobedience into government, she aims to embed this spirit within the very institutional fabric of the polity. Second, I suggest that we have strong reasons to take the proposal seriously as an account of how the constitutional state should respond to dissenting minorities. The call to institutionalize civil disobedience can be defended as an approach that is different to — and ultimately more appealing than — familiar liberal and democratic perspectives on this issue.

In this article, it is argued that cosmopolitans should elucidate the qualities and dispositions, or 'virtues', associated with the ideal of cosmopolitan citizenship. Bryan Turner's suggestion that cosmopolitan virtue should be identified as a type of 'Socratic irony', which enables individuals to achieve distance from their homeland or way of life, is explored. While acknowledging the attractions of his account, certain limitations which indicate the need to generate a richer theory of cosmopolitan virtue are identified. To that end, an alternative picture of cosmopolitan virtue is presented by drawing on Hannah Arendt's ideas of 'world' and 'worldliness'. It is argued that cosmopolitan virtue involves the adoption of a self-reflexive mode of being in the world, the cultivation of a heightened care or feeling for the world, and the ability to adopt certain skills in the manner of our disclosures to the world.

The past decade has witnessed the emergence of numerous 'cosmopolitan' theories of humanitarian military intervention. These theories anticipate a more cosmopolitan future, where interventions will be authorized by new cosmopolitan institutions and carried out by reformed cosmopolitan militaries. The contention of my article is that despite the merits of these approaches, it is often difficult to discern whether and how cosmopolitan theories can inform assessments of interventions that take place in our non-cosmopolitan present. Through taking Jurgen Habermas's judgements of two recent interventions as a 'case study', I reflect on the considerations that might come into play when cosmopolitans attempt to translate their future-orientated theories into practical engagements with the world as it is. Adapted from the source document.