Democracy without limits: Human rights and democratization of the global order

My dissertation identifies and analyzes a tension between the universal principles of democracy---equality and human rights---and their limited realization in territorial states. Using globalization as a lens to focus on this problem, I undertake a historical and conceptual analysis of how democracy got tangled up in the early modern discourse of sovereignty and incorporated its exclusive logic and structure. Globalization undermines the empirical and theoretical foundations of sovereignty, making the legitimacy of modern democracy precarious as well. There is a subordinate democratic discourse of emancipation grounded in the universal logic of equality and human rights that suggests an alternative to the modern, sovereign formulation of democracy. I articulate and defend a theory of democracy as human rights based on this subordinate discourse and develop a set of institutions designed to implement the theory. The historical-conceptual approach adopted here contrasts with the standard empirical approaches to studying globalization's effects on democracy and generates important and unorthodox findings about the democratization of the emerging global order.