Principal speaker
Luis Cabrera, Associate Professor
‘Gandhiji, I Have no Homeland’: Insights for Cosmopolitan Democracy from B.R. Ambedkar, India’s Anti-caste Campaigner and Constitutional Architect
Many current thinkers on trans-state and global democracy make implicit presumptions of cultural unity within countries. Constitutionalizing a comprehensive schedule of rights beyond the state, they argue, would show too little respect for a global social diversity of states and could simply reinforce a Western normative imperialism or ‘arrogant cosmopolitanism’.
Some 70 years ago, B.R. Ambedkar, the champion of India’s untouchables and architect of the country’s post-independence constitution, warned sympathetic outsiders against similar state-centric presumptions. In reflexively supporting an Indian independence movement dominated by higher-caste Hindus, he argued, they ignored the continued oppression of those at the bottom of the social structure and tacitly helped to sustain it. He also defended his favored human rights-based constitutional approach against charges it was too far influenced by Western models. Ambedkar, in fact, was both a subtle and prolific theorist of citizenship and democracy whose work connects to the cosmopolitan moral tradition in some key aspects. He develops a theory of ‘unified diversity’ within trans-national democracy, where linguistically distinct polities are unified by a shared second language and administration, which offers valuable institutional insights for trans-state democracy. That, as well as his insistence on strong constitutional checks on exclusion and oppression, points toward a model of democracy beyond the state that could be appropriately protective of those within states while also being appropriately respectful of domestic social diversity.
Event categories
RSVP
RSVP on or before Monday 11 May 2015 , by email b.hammond@griffith.edu.au , or by phone 54705
Event contact details
- Belle Hammond
- http://
- 37354705