La paix : l’Idée de l’avenir du monde selon Kant. Kant est un auteur qui ose, alors que l’Europe s’est construite par la guerre entre les Etats, penser que la guerre est « démodée » et tend à perdre toute valeur politique. Il ose penser que la paix sera désormais ce qui fait la valeur des politiques extérieures de tous les Etats. Il a inspiré la SDN et l’ONU.La paix entre les nations est d’abord une exigence morale (« la raison pratique impose son veto », écrit Kant). Mais cette exigence morale doit obtenir une validité juridique, historique et politique pour devenir une réalité juridique historique et politique / The peace: the Idea of the future of the world according to KantKant is an author who dares, while Europe built itself by the war between States, to think that the war is "old-fashioned" and tends to lose any political value. He(it) dares to think that the peace will be from now on what makes the value of the foreign policies of all the States. He(it) inspired LEAGUE OF NATIONS and UNO.The peace between nations is at first a moral requirement (" the practical reason imposes its veto ", writes Kant). But this moral requirement has to obtain a legal, historic and political validity to become a legal historic and political reality.

Transnational adoption generates ample controversy both within and outside the adoption community. In recent times transnational adoption made international headlines following a wave of ‘celebrity adopters’ and calls to airlift children for overseas adoption from the economically disadvantaged nation of Haiti in the aftermath of the devastating earthquake on 12th January 2010. Some see the practice as being about ‘rescuing’ orphaned children, while others argue that it is parent-centred, intrinsically racist and represents a form of Western colonialism. Igniting such fears is the fact that transnational adoptions both in the past and at present, typically involve Non-White children from mostly Non-Western developing nations and adoptive parents of predominantly White, Western backgrounds. 
 
 This thesis is based on research conducted from 2005 to 2010 among 35 transnationally adoptive parents who reside in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia. The key question explored is: What impact does transnational adoption have on the lives of adoptive parents and their own sense of identity and belonging? In answering this question I consider the ways these parents legitimise, define and explain the role of being ‘suitable’ carers of children adopted from overseas, with a particular focus on the racial, cultural and ethnic dimensions involved. This includes how they imagine, reconstruct and integrate aspects of adoptees’ birth heritage into their family lives. 
 
 The distinct feature of this thesis is that most existing adoption research in both Australia and overseas is overwhelmingly focused on the lives of adoptees and many of these studies are often conducted by researchers who themselves are White adoptive parents. This study represents an interesting contrast as it focuses on transnationally adoptive parents, written from the perspective of someone adopted from Vietnam into a White Australian family. 
 
 The theoretical framework chosen to guide my research draws upon sociological studies on the family, on migration including cosmopolitanism and transnationalism, and issues of diversity such as critical race theory and studies of ethnicity. Such scholarship is well suited to explain the challenges adoptive parents face in building families who do not share blood ties or the same racial, cultural, ethnic and national backgrounds. The methodological approach is inductive, reflexive and employs multiple methods to generate qualitative data. This thesis is organised around three main stages across the participants’ life course: before, during and after they have adopted. The findings were that most parents grew up in predominantly White environments, with many identifying as patriotic Australians in childhood before developing more cosmopolitan dispositions in adulthood. Most chose to adopt after struggling with issues of infertility but also claim to have been influenced by their interest in other cultures. However, in the process of adopting, the participants display frustration with the government’s adoption assessment process, which they viewed as highly bureaucratic and expecting an unfair level of cultural knowledge concerning adoptees’ birth heritage.
 
 Despite these frustrations, all the participants were observed to attempt to integrate various ‘culture keeping’ and symbolic ethnic practices into their lives in the lead up to adopting as well as after their adopted children joined them. A number also develop transnational ties to adoptees’ countries of origin, such as sending financial remittances to surviving birth relatives and making return trips there. These combined activities and processes are observed to have a transformative effect on transnationally adoptive parents’ constructions of identity resulting in a shift from many identifying as being ‘just’ Australians to co-identifying with the ethnicity of their children or even describing themselves as ‘world citizens’. 
 
 At the same time, most participants did not appear to have a significant level of understanding how issues of ‘racial’ and cultural privilege shape and complicate their lives as Whites raising Non-White children in predominantly White environments. This includes lacking robust strategies to challenge forms of racism that can undermine their own status as ‘real’ parents and their adopted children identities. As such, I conclude that further attention needs to be given to exposing and challenging how issues of race shape the lives of White transnationally adoptive parents and their ongoing efforts to be ‘suitable’ carers of Non-White overseas born children.

<p>The problems of the world today are global and thus we must act on a global level to solve them. We need to establish a perpetual and global peace and we also need to create global justice. How is this to be done? In 2008 the philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö tried to provide an answer on these questions in the book Global Democracy – The Case for a World Government. In his book Tännsjö argues for an institutional cosmopolitan approach, trying to convince us that a world government would guarantee both a global and perpetual peace, as well as global justice. In this thesis I will present Tännsjö´s main argument and then share my thoughts and give my critique on them.</p>

<p>Throughout the course of human civilizations, archaeology is considered as a tool that can be manipulated to achieve certain kind of objectives. For centuries, people struggle for the rights of possession of certain artifacts with significant meanings to their collectivity. One of the main aspects of the debate in archaeology is ethics, and how it plays a big role in mapping out a state of difficulty that needs to be resolved. This thesis deals with the issues of cultural property rights, and evaluating some moral stands behind the argument, by looking at Lord’s Elgin marbles case as a starting point. Could the marbles be considered as stolen properties bought from Lord Elgin? Is repatriation indispensable? Does the Ottomans Empires and Lord Elgin has the right to dispose and bring home the marbles, respectively, at the first place? These questions would be analyze through both conservationist and “repatriationist” perspectives, Robert Nozick’s philosophical perspectives on cultural property rights and the cosmopolitanism’s views on dealing with antiquities and artifacts restitution. Despite the fact that cultural property rights issues can be a delicate matter, it is important to show that there is still hope for an overlapping consensus among conservationist and pro-restitution group.</p>

Throughout the course of human civilizations, archaeology is considered as a tool that can be manipulated to achieve certain kind of objectives. For centuries, people struggle for the rights of possession of certain artifacts with significant meanings to their collectivity. One of the main aspects of the debate in archaeology is ethics, and how it plays a big role in mapping out a state of difficulty that needs to be resolved. This thesis deals with the issues of cultural property rights, and evaluating some moral stands behind the argument, by looking at Lord’s Elgin marbles case as a starting point. Could the marbles be considered as stolen properties bought from Lord Elgin? Is repatriation indispensable? Does the Ottomans Empires and Lord Elgin has the right to dispose and bring home the marbles, respectively, at the first place? These questions would be analyze through both conservationist and “repatriationist” perspectives, Robert Nozick’s philosophical perspectives on cultural property rights and the cosmopolitanism’s views on dealing with antiquities and artifacts restitution. Despite the fact that cultural property rights issues can be a delicate matter, it is important to show that there is still hope for an overlapping consensus among conservationist and pro-restitution group.

An engaging education attends to the subjective quality of students’ perceptions and experiences within learning and school life: It converges on whether, how, and why students meaning-make and belong within the school; and focuses on the conditions for their attachment, participation, and commitment within school programmes, practices, policies, and people. Three main questions guided this two-phase, mixed-methods study: 1) What makes international schools engaging places for students? 2) What meanings do students attach to key areas of their day-to-day experiences within the international school in Hong Kong? 3) How might re-imagining student engagement through a cosmopolitan lens lead to clearer understandings of students’ experiences within the international school? In Phase 1, an achieved sample of 729 senior secondary students at 9 purposively selected schools were surveyed using a mainly Likert scale questionnaire: to describe their socio-demographics; to examine the relationships between their socio-demographics, attitudinal features, and schooling experiences, as measured by the researcher-designed Experience of International School – Revised (EIS-R) scale; and to cluster using their socio-demographics and attitudinal profiles. Building on the tripartite cluster solution, Phase 2 used observations and interviews with 30 purposively sampled teacher-leaders and 34 students, from across the three clusters, to investigate how the “institutional habitus” (Thomas, 2002) the students encountered at two international schools shaped their experiences of and engagement within the contexts of school culture, community, curriculum, and co-curriculum. A two-stage process of thematic content analysis revealed two super ordinate themes: 1) race/ethnic, linguistic, and nationality identities intersected to shape and challenge patterns of relationships amongst students (and between students/families) and the school to both include and exclude; and 2) the institutional contexts supported and constrained students’ sense of belonging therein. Overall, seen through a cosmopolitan lens the study implications are discussed as three lessons to achieve a better fit between students and the international school: 1) Attend to the school’s living and learning environment; 2) Take a cosmopolitan turn to school for cosmopolitan subjectivity; and 3) Adopt a student engagement-driven approach to improve and reform school policy, administration, and practice.

An engaging education attends to the subjective quality of students’ perceptions and experiences within learning and school life: It converges on whether, how, and why students meaning-make and belong within the school; and focuses on the conditions for their attachment, participation, and commitment within school programmes, practices, policies, and people. Three main questions guided this two-phase, mixed-methods study: 1) What makes international schools engaging places for students? 2) What meanings do students attach to key areas of their day-to-day experiences within the international school in Hong Kong? 3) How might re-imagining student engagement through a cosmopolitan lens lead to clearer understandings of students’ experiences within the international school? In Phase 1, an achieved sample of 729 senior secondary students at 9 purposively selected schools were surveyed using a mainly Likert scale questionnaire: to describe their socio-demographics; to examine the relationships between their socio-demographics, attitudinal features, and schooling experiences, as measured by the researcher-designed Experience of International School – Revised (EIS-R) scale; and to cluster using their socio-demographics and attitudinal profiles. Building on the tripartite cluster solution, Phase 2 used observations and interviews with 30 purposively sampled teacher-leaders and 34 students, from across the three clusters, to investigate how the “institutional habitus” (Thomas, 2002) the students encountered at two international schools shaped their experiences of and engagement within the contexts of school culture, community, curriculum, and co-curriculum. A two-stage process of thematic content analysis revealed two super ordinate themes: 1) race/ethnic, linguistic, and nationality identities intersected to shape and challenge patterns of relationships amongst students (and between students/families) and the school to both include and exclude; and 2) the institutional contexts supported and constrained students’ sense of belonging therein. Overall, seen through a cosmopolitan lens the study implications are discussed as three lessons to achieve a better fit between students and the international school: 1) Attend to the school’s living and learning environment; 2) Take a cosmopolitan turn to school for cosmopolitan subjectivity; and 3) Adopt a student engagement-driven approach to improve and reform school policy, administration, and practice.

Visigothic Hispania, Islamicate al-Andalus and Christian Spain are names representing three scriptural monotheistic civilizations in Iberia. Al-Andalus has stood apart from this list by representing a time and a place of convivencia in which Christians, Jews and Muslims cooperated and coexisted. Why and how the Islamicate civilization in al-Andalus differed from the Visigoths or the Spanish, despite all three sharing a religious orientation is an historical puzzle. By exploring the legal status of Jews within the legal regimes of Christian Rome and Visigothic Hispania, this thesis will suggest that it is cosmopolitanism and its converse exclusivism that best explain concepts of convivencia or coexistence in the face of religious diversity.

My dissertation focuses on a set of Anglo-American novels that deal with the events of 9/11. Identifying thematic and stylistic differences in the fiction on this topic, I distinguish between novels that represent directly the jolts of trauma in the wake of the attacks, and novels that, while still holding the events as an underlying operative force in the narrative, do not openly represent them but envision their long-term aftermath. The first group of novels comprises Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s The Writing on the Wall (2005), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005). The second one includes Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs (2009), John Updike’s Terrorist (2006) and Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008). Drawing on concepts from trauma theory, particularly by Cathy Caruth and Dominick LaCapra, and combining them with the ethical philosophies of Levinas and Heidegger, I argue that the constructions of 9/11 in Anglo-American fiction are essentially twofold: authors who narrate 9/11 as a tragic human loss in the city of New York turn it into an occasion for an ethical dialogue with the reader and potentially with the “Other,” whereas authors who address 9/11 as a recent sociopolitical event transform it into a goad toward a bitter cultural indictment of the US middle-class, whose ingrained inertia, patriotism and self-righteousness have been either magnified or twisted by the attacks. Considering processes of meaning-making, annihilation, ideological reduction and apathy that arose from 9/11 and its versions, I have identified what could be called, adapting Peter Elbow’s expression from pedagogical studies, the “forked” rhetoric of media and politics, a rhetorical mode in which both discourses are essentially closed, non-hermeneutic, and rooted in the same rationale: exploiting 9/11 for consensus. On the contrary, in what I call the New-Yorkization of 9/11, I highlighted how the situatedness of the public discourses that New Yorkers constructed to tell their own tragedy rescues the Ur-Phaenomenon of 9/11 from the epistemological commodification that intellectual, mediatic and political interpretations forced on it. Furthermore, pointing to the speciousness of arguments that deem 9/11 literature sentimental and unimaginative, I claim that the traumatic literature on the attacks constitutes an example of ethical practice, since it originates from witnesses of the catastrophe, it represents communal solidarity, and it places a crucial demand on the reader as an empathic listener and ethical agent. Ethical counternarratives oppose the ideological simplification of the 9/11 attacks and develop instead a complex counter-rhetoric of emotions and inclusiveness that we could read as a particular instantiation of an ethics of the self and “Other.” As much as the 9/11 “ethical” novels suggest that “survivability” in times of trauma depends on “relationality” (J. Butler), the “cultural” ones unveil the insensitivity and superficiality of the actual US society far away from the site of trauma. The binary framework I use implies that, outside of New York City, 9/11 is narrated neither traumatically (in terms of literary form), nor as trauma (in terms of textual fact). Consequently, on the basis of a spatial criterion and in parallel to the ethical novels, I have identified a category of “cultural” fiction that tackles the events of 9/11 at a distance, spatially and conceptually. In essence, 9/11 brings neither shock, nor promise of regeneration to these peripheral settings, except for Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, a story in which we are returned to a post-9/11 New York where different ethnic subjects can re-negotiate creatively their identities. The cultural novels are ultimately pervaded by a mode of tragic irony that is unthinkable for the ethical novels and that is used in these texts to convey the inanity and hubris of a politically uneducated and naïve America – one that has difficulties to point Afghanistan on a map, or to transcend dualistic schemes of value that embody precisely Bush’s Manichaeism. The potential for cultural pluralism, solidarity and historical memory set up by the New York stories does not ramify into the America that is far away from the neuralgic epicenter of historical trauma. This proves that the traumatizing effects and the related ethical calls engendered by 9/11 remain confined to the New York literature on the topic.

<p>This thesis explores the confluence and clashes between local and global cultural flows in Latin America through the multiple literary movements and tendencies for which the Colombian author, Fernando Vallejo, acts as a unifying agent. My analysis pulls from Decolonial, Aesthetic and World Literary theories, in order to analyze how cosmopolitanism and globalization resonate in contemporary Latin American letters through a survey of three geocultural categories: the Colombian local, the Latin American regional, and the literary global. My analysis of the local tracks the formal evolution of the Colombian Novela de la Violencia into the contemporary Novela Urbana and the parallel political challenge to the conventional Lettered City in Colombia after the Violencia. In terms of the regional, I critique the idea of a positive and universally stabilizing cosmopolitanism through a collective analysis of a generation of Latin American writers that were forced to travel to the cosmopolitan center through exile rather than as an act of freewill, a generation that I refer to in this project as the Generation of '72. And my evaluation of the global considers how a singular World Literary aesthetics and political economy of prestige weights negatively on contemporary Latin American authors. Through a survey of the roughly fifty novels and short stories that fall under the purview of both the Colombian Urban Novel and the Generation of `72, I conclude that aesthetic borders - the places where multiple forms of perception converge- open up spaces and forums of critique of rigid cultural models and century old aesthetic formulae, a tendency that I refer to as a poetics of globalism.</p> / Dissertation