Globalização, democracia e direitos humanos: os movimentos sociais e o processo de construção de uma esfera pública plural e democrática mundial

Abstract

The research presented here analyzes law and politics renewal from the urgency of emancipatory political praxis of citizens and social movements, aiming at establishing a critical, plural and democratic public domain in the contemporary international public arena. To that end, we investigate the reasons behind the crisis on social, political and instrumental scientific paradigms; and the launching of new sociabilities and knowledge based on the acknowledgement of cooperative and dialogical processes within sociocultural, philosophical and scientific practices. For that purpose, contributions developed by Jürgen Habermas were taken into consideration through the elaboration of the communicative acting paradigm and the deliberate democracy model. We intend to expose the contributions from social movements for the conception of a new democratic and cosmopolitan political-legal culture when facing authoritarian and mercantilist processes that lead economical globalization in contemporary societies. The main goal of this research is, therefore, to analyze crisis of social, political and legal characters in contemporary societies and to propose ways to forward their recovery; from the emergence of new democratic ethicalpolitical paradigms. In the first three chapters, we discuss a revaluation of a philosophical, sociological, political and legal legacy developed in modernism as to better comprehend the changes generated in contemporary societies; particularly when considering the development of globalization. In the last two chapters, writings on social transformations produced by globalization are brought into light in order to capture social, political and legal effects of said process during the experienced setbacks in the field of democracy and human rights due to the widespread adoption of neoliberal privatization policies. Such practices have been reported by a group of citizens along with critical social movements that fight for their right to be acknowledged as new and more influential political players in the international decision-making scene. The first chapter approaches the crisis of the philosophy of awareness and the new communicative paradigm proposed by Jürgen Habermas to overcome difficulties in logocentric, instrumental and scientistic rationales. In the second chapter, contemporary ethical orientations are discussed – whether liberal, communitarian and the ethics of speech through the contributions by John Rawls, Charles Taylor and Habermas. In the third chapter, the relations between society and law in modernism are examined through the contributions from the main social - classical and contemporary - theorists. In the fourth chapter, we investigate the renewal of democracy’s meaning and evaluation through the awakening of the development of democratic thinking in the contemporary world and the emergence of new social movements, focusing on the contributions by Charles Taylor, Hannah Arendt, Habermas and other contemporary thinkers. In the fifth chapter, we promote research on meaning and other globalization effects in order to analyze the reasons behind crisis and transformations in the contemporary State, difficulties and changes in the understanding of what democracy and human rights are, as well as the possibilities of creating a plural public opinion along with global criticism encouraged by the social movements’ empowerment praxis when facing a worldwide social crisis.