Response to Peter J. Spiro's review of Social Movements for Global Democracy

Peter Spiro's portrayal of my book Beyond Citizenship illustrates the very problem we have in confronting the underlying causes of global crises and envisioning alternatives to existing models of governance. Legal scholar and activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos argued quite cogently in 2007 that the struggle for global social justice is also a struggle for global cognitive justice (“Beyond Abyssal Thinking: From Global Lines to Ecologies of Knowledges,” Eurozine, at http://eurozine.com/pdf/2007-06-29-santos-en.pdf). In order to succeed, this struggle requires a new kind of thinking. Such new thinking is apparent in many contemporary social movements, but academic training and practice inhibits our ability to appreciate the wisdom of those deemed less worthy to speak to the grand questions of our day. © 2009, American Political Science Association. All rights reserved.