Global Solidarity and Cosmopolitan Agency: Online Public Discourses on Child Slavery

• In Event: Borders, Nations, and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

The growing power of multinational corporations in a globalized world is shifting the power relations between state, economy and civil society. Where states lose power, a common argument runs, a democratising empowerment of civil society compensates. This argument, however, rests on the assumption that civil society groups are able to act as representatives of citizens and thus function as cites for a representative form of collective agency.
Discourse analyses of Western online debates concerning child labor and slavery testify to a Western social imaginary, which is devoid of any kind of collective, cosmopolitan agency and filled with doubt and uncertainty. The publics studied perceive of their global agency as individual, strictly economic and weak at that.

Author

• Anne Vestergaard, Copenhagen Business School / IKL