Democracy in contested territory: on the legitimacy of global legal pluralism
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The proliferation of law-making beyond the nation-state has produced a landscape of thoroughgoing ‘global legal pluralism’ (GLP), in which legal regimes overlap in the same social field. Individuals find themselves under the rule of multiple and conflicting regimes, some of which have no ties of accountability to democratic constituencies. GLP thus rouses a perplexing picture of globalization as it untethers law-makers from jurisdictions, and governance from constituencies. Is democratic legitimation possible within the tangled spaces of governance that characterize the post-national constellation? I argue that yes, democracy is possible in a legally plural world. Specifically, GLP is compatible with democratic principles when restricted by a territorial principle, which limits legal pluralism to authorities with the potential to be legitimated by territorial constituencies, and this is because territorial enmeshment is politically fundamental. However, I also argue that the reconciliation of overlapping rule and democracy requires rethinking territory as a non-sovereign jurisdiction, i.e. territories must be conceived as overlapping and contested. This conception of territory includes not only states, but also municipalities, supranational federations, and other possible territorial forms. The territorial principle should therefore be understood in line with cosmopolitan calls to theorize democracy beyond the sovereign nation-state.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".