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This paper argues that a political reading of mobility is instrumental for understanding the role of democracy within globalised structures of power. Relegated to a socio-economic background that prompts new engagements with democracy, mobility has been neglected as a condition of possibility and as a form of democratic practice. Drawing on Georg Simmel's sociology of money, we show that practices of transversal mobility constitute democratic moments in relation to structures of power that are constituted across the territorial circumscription of national states. Mobility works directly upon structures of power through universal rights and the politics of the 'mob'. As democratic practices, both rights and mass politics rely on the principle of equality. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopower and its new technologies centred on life and the living lack a clear definition of the concept of life. While Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of biopower has differentiated between two concepts of life, zoe and bios, bare life and politically qualified life, Agamben’s notion of zoe has often been equated with the Foucauldian understanding of life. This paper will show that the conflation of life and bare life, the zone of indistinction they enter erases the space for political action, for processes of re-subjectivation. To this end it draws on a Deleuzian understanding of life and confronts it with Foucault’s and Agamben’s. Deleuze introduces a different notion from both Agamben’s zoe and Foucault’s life, that of a life or ‘impersonal life’, life which cannot be attributed to a subject, which only exists in a matrix of desubjectivation. The challenge of abject life is that of its status as excluded, downcast life and therefore cannot be based on a biopolitics of impersonal life. In this understanding of life, biopolitics needs to be exposed as desubjectivating, as erasing political differences and short-circuiting political claims on the status of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how secondary states experience unipolarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small states are characterised by a deficit of power. Due to their limited capabilities they lack both the capacity to influence other actors and to prevent these actors from influencing them. To overcome this dilemma small states have to choose between e ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]