The “All Affected Interests Principle” (AAIP) and the related “All Subjected Principle” (ASP) articulate principles of political legitimacy that can serve as potent instruments for evaluating the legitimacy of non-state institutional orders. However, while both are useful for evaluating the legitimacy of already-existing institutional orders, many of most important democratic legitimacy failures of our age arise not only from the undemocratic character of already-constituted orders but also from the fact that in many key domains we lack any institutionalized capacity to address the urgent collective action problems we face. How can such institutions be established in a democratically legitimate way, as an exercise of democratic collective agency? The chapter takes a historicizing turn, arguing that AAIP and ASP creatively retrieve and reconstruct old ideas in the history of democratic thought, liberating them from the presupposition that they can only be actualized within the territorial boundaries of the state. It then argues that we can reconstruct the concept of constituent power as a form of democratic agency to show how democratically legitimate sites of binding collective decision beyond the state can come into being.

In this chapter, Melissa Williams begins from the challenge that most contemporary democratic theory is rooted exclusively in Euro-American thought traditions. This is problematic not only for understanding democracy in non-Western contexts but also for crafting democratic theory that can be responsive to globalization. How can a theory of democracy claim global validity if it draws exclusively on Western political experience? The chapter adopts an experimental and playful approach to mapping a strategy of inquiry for deparochializing democratic theory in a global age. It identifies points of contact between contemporary debates over global democracy and forms of contemporary politics that draw on non-Western understandings of the political, focusing on the scales of politics that are most salient for democratic political action: global, state, transnational, and local. The chapter considers three case studies of non-Western conceptions of democracy at these different scales: contemporary Chinese cosmopolitanism (tianxia theory), state-led local democratization in China, and the transnational peasants’ movement, La Vía Campesina. Drawing connections between these cases and the literature on democracy in the global era, the chapter argues that the cases press us toward a transcultural, trans-scalar, translocal, and systemic understanding of democracy’s global potential.

This introductory chapter articulates the unifying vision for the volume: that comparative political theory is a transformative and intergenerational practice for the discipline as a whole, in our teaching as well as our research. It is not a niche subfield of political theory, of interest only to specialized experts in particular thought traditions around the world, but is salient to all political theorists, regardless of their methodological or theoretical commitments, who seek modes of political inquiry and analysis that are salient for the twenty-first-century challenges of a now-globalized modernity. The chapter canvasses the structural obstacles to the transformation of the discipline, explores its tendencies to reproduce itself in the image of “the Western canon,” and situates the task of comparative political theory within the larger frame of the tasks of political theory simpliciter. It also addresses the fact that the practice of deparochializing political theory may vary depending on a particular scholar’s location in the world and position in the global academy. Finally, it provides an overview of the contributors’ past contributions to “deparochializing political theory” and a summary of their chapters’ arguments.

Multispectral imaging – the acquisition of spatially contiguous imaging data in a modest number (~3–16) of spectral bandpasses – has proven to be a powerful technique for augmenting panchromatic imaging observations on Mars focused on geologic and/or atmospheric context. Specifically, multispectral imaging using modern digital CCD photodetectors and narrowband filters in the 400–1100 nm wavelength region on the Mars Pathfinder, Mars Exploration Rover, Phoenix, and Mars Science Laboratory missions has provided new information on the composition and mineralogy of fine-grained regolith components (dust, soils, sand, spherules, coatings), rocky surface regions (cobbles, pebbles, boulders, outcrops, and fracture-filling veins), meteorites, and airborne dust and other aerosols. Here we review recent scientific results from Mars surface-based multispectral imaging investigations, including the ways that these observations have been used in concert with other kinds of measurements to enhance the overall scientific return from Mars surface missions.