Theoria

In the wake of globalisation different social science disciplines have found themselves entering into similar terrains of inquiry. However, each discipline tends to draw on different and often contradictory understandings of the political, and of related notions such as power. The lack of a shared notion of politics may prevent social scientists from gaining important insights from other disciplines. In this paper I therefore seek to demonstrate that seemingly contradictory notions of politics are better seen as different forms of political interaction. I define politics as activities through which people and groups articulate, negotiate, implement and enforce competing claims. By distinguishing different types of claims made within different institutional circumstances, I outline three basic forms of political interaction: governance, stalemate and social dilemma, and give examples of how each of these forms of political interaction has emerged in response to the global integration of market in different circumstances and areas of the world.

The place and future of the Humanities is under scrutiny in many parts of the world. The diminution in the university commenced in the 1980s with the rise of free-market thinking associated with Thatcher and Reagan. It was the end of the Cold War, however, with the rise of globalisation that control was tightened in higher education under the guise of increased freedom. The increasing emphasis on utilitarian forms of knowledge needed for economic growth further imperilled the Humanities. In South Africa, upon which the argument draws for illustration, policy-makers paid increasing lip service to academic freedom and institutional autonomy while directing policy interest and resources away from the Humanities.

Garrett W. Brown has argued that donor voting caucuses produce a deliberative deficit between donor and non-donor members in the Global Fund International Board. Although we agree with this assessment, in our research on low-transaction cost alternatives to cope with consistent deliberative conditions (i.e. low-cost arrangements to bring about the exchange among Board members in a certain way) we have found that deliberation and interest-based preference maximisation are not necessarily mutually exclusive, as long as we manage to stop donor members from behaving like monopolists. To this end, we have to open up the Board from its present state of non-transparency, so that new input can be obtained from new constituents. This will also soften the current principal-agent structure that links members to their donors, easing the transition to market-driven governance rules that provide for the replacement of Board members if they do not fulfil the new constituents' expectations.

In the preceding article Alejandro Agafonow explores the idea of incorporating market-based approaches into the structure of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in order to address particular deliberative and democratic shortcomings (Agafonow 2011). This exploration was in response to an article I wrote on safeguarding deliberative global governance within the Global Fund and with particular deliberative deficits that were highlighted within that article (Brown 2010). In my article, it was argued that the decision- making capacity of the Global Fund suffered from a deliberative deficit in that donor members enjoyed an unfair advantage in boardroom deliberations due to two structural inequalities. First, donors enjoyed an unfair deliberative advantage because of their ability to utilise an effective veto, which manifested itself in the form of possible threats in the reduction of future donations if specific initiatives passed. Second, donors often enjoyed an unfair negotiating position due to their ability to meet prior to Board meetings and thus possessed an ability to create donor caucuses where collective voting strategies could be formulated. It was concluded that these two conditions created real perceptions of unequal deliberation between donor and non-donor Board members and therefore threatened to render the Global Fund’s multisectoral mandate for creating deliberative decision-making via agreed consensus as mere window-dressing for an obfuscated form of multilateral power politics as usual. In responding to this deliberative deficit, I argued that certain regulative devices should be incorporated into the Global Fund Framework Document as a means to safeguard deliberative procedures constitutionally within the multisectoral Global Fund Board.

Sympathizing with the Enemy: Reconciliation, Transitional Justice, Negotiation by Nir Eisikovits