Title: Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders, edited by Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis
Abstract: Commons and enclosures have gained renewed interest in recent scholarship. Discussions of ‘new enclosures’ and relations of commoning have become important framing discourses in science and technology studies, anthropology, radical history and political economy. Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders takes these ideas in a different direction. The book is divided into four sections to explore divergent manifestations, starting first with the theory of cosmopolitan commons then moving onto case studies: the valorization of nature; protecting humans and nature; and examples of cosmopolitan commons. Each case study offers a different articulation of a commons and a conceptual framework. It would be a good text for an upper division undergraduate course: the book is well suited to an international affairs or international studies class that explores the commons as resistance to, or an alternative from, the exploitation of globalized capitalism. The book opens with two chapters by the editors, Nil Disco and Eda Kranakis, in which they lay out the theoretical structure of the book. By way of a review of an interdisciplinary literature on the commons, they argue there has been a gap in commons theory. This gap is because commons theory is usually grounded in mathematical economics focused on commons as ‘goods’ or development economics and anthropology describing an ‘archaic form of social organization’ and/or localized practices in the global south. In contrast, this book focuses on ‘cosmopolitan scales’ of governance, which they argue are the building blocks for regional regimes of political and economic integration and globalization. For the editors, these forms of cosmopolitan governance have become integral to the functioning of a ‘new generation of commons’.
Publication Year: 2013
Publication Date: 2013-10-17
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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