Global Justice and the Limits of Defensive Politics: Dr Brian Milstein Presents at ECPR General Conference
Brian Milstein, Associate Professor in UL’s Department of Politics and Public Administration, co-organized a panel with Petra Gümplová of Friedrich Schiller University Jena at the European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR) General Conference in Kraków, Poland, held 8–11 September 2026.
The panel, “Critical Theory and Global Justice: Reimagining Normativity in a Destabilized World,” examined the ways critical theory might orient commitments to democracy, emancipation, and global justice amid rising nationalism, democratic backsliding, and ecological crisis.
Milstein’s paper, “Keywords of the Postcosmopolitan Condition,” examined how contemporary political vocabulary reflects a retreat from the cosmopolitan aspirations of the 1990s and 2000s towards more defensive, inward-looking political agendas. For example, the shift from post-2008 debates about capitalism and inequality to present-day discussions of cost-of-living and affordability redirects our normative focus from “equality” to “sufficiency,” while reframing economic troubles as domestic policy issues rather than global systemic ones. Likewise, the language of democratic resilience prioritizes protecting existing institutions over expanding democratic potentials. Influential accounts of polycrisis, meanwhile, present overlapping crises as conditions to manage or adapt to, rather than openings for systemic change.
Though recognizing the importance of defending democracy and addressing immediate economic pressures, the paper questions the limits of a contemporary discourse that lowers political ambitions and directs attention towards domestic responses, even as the underlying problems remain transnational and systemic. Milstein argued for retaining space for emancipatory critique capable of challenging those structures and imagining more ambitious alternatives.
