Honors Program
Honors in Philosophy
Date of Award
5-2016
Thesis Professor(s)
Michael Allen
Thesis Professor Department
Philosophy and Humanities
Thesis Reader(s)
Michael Allen, Allen Coates, Colin Glennon
Abstract
Maintaining the essential features of local democracy, representation and contestation, my theory allows for the representation of the interest of subpopulations in the global community by actors such as nongovernmental organization and intergovernmental organizations. I will begin by outlining what features are necessary for a theory’s consideration as democratic in nature. Then, relying upon democracy in a broad sense, it will be my aim to demonstrate that the right to democracy is universal human right. The following stage will provide the backing, by way of the moral progress of human rights, that the right to democracy is expressible by “importantly affected” subgroups in the global arena. The final stage of my conceptual defense will focus on the validation of representatives who have no institutional connection with the populations they represent.
With such established, the paper will proceed into a practical defense, discussing how claims made by actors can be accepted or rejected by represented subpopulations. It will then become necessary to demonstrate that the paternalistic claims made by representatives are incorporable into a democratic theory without forgoing the essence of democracy. To show this is feasible, methods of appealing paternalistic claims by way of international human rights courts will be explained. Finally, possibilities to mediate general feasibility issues will be explored.
Document Type
Honors Thesis - Open Access
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Shell, Avery C., "Detaching Democratic Representation From State and National Borders" (2016). Undergraduate Honors Theses. Paper 294. https://dc.etsu.edu/honors/294
Copyright
Copyright by the authors.