The global imaginary from which cosmopolitanism derives its ideological power has become increasingly dominant. This has set up contradictory responses. Cosmopolitanism is both a core expression and a casualty of our modern/postmodern times. On the one hand, there is a tendency for the intellectually trained to believe that good cosmopolitanism is a necessity in a globalising world. For those people, it does not make sense that positive global exchange between people concerned about fairness and justice should have its nationalist, realist, and provincial critics. On the other hand, there are those who associate cosmopolitanism variously with the abstract emptiness of disembodied globalisation (communitarians), the rapacious consequences of capitalist globalisation (alter-globalism activists), or the assault on certain sections of the national body (right-wing populists). Responding to this tension, this chapter defends a philosophy and ideology that are commonly held while critically and radically reworking its often-assumed precepts, agreeing at least with communitarian and alter-globalist distancing of the easy forms of cosmopolitanism.

Whereas the previous chapter explored the great unsettling of human security effected by the postmodern war-machine, we now turn to a critical examination of the violent consequences of the globalisation of modern codifying process – in particular, through colonisation and imperialism. The chapter turns to what on first glance appears to be relatively unmediated embodied violence. In descriptive terms, we move from drones to machetes. However, what we find in this violence is the clash of ontological formations as prior forms of identity and meaning are existentially unsettled by modern impositions. The broader argument here is that the global spread of unreflexively modern ways of organising meaning and identity, particularly in situations of unequal power, has had horrifying consequences in the Global South. Imperialism and colonialism have a lasting impact. Abstracting from prior dominant forms of customary and traditional life, it has ushered in forms of violence that were previously constrained: genocide, civil war, and never-ending localised transnational conflict. The chapter uses the Rwandan genocide and Sri Lankan ‘civil’ war as its key points of reference.

Embodied movement within and across national borders has been increasing. Prompted by intensifying local–global unsettling, it has led to a series of tensions concerning the way even the most supposedly cosmopolitan of countries now treat the refugees and migrants. Those who seek refuge have become a problem. In this conflict-ridden world in which the displacement has become endemic – and in this mediated world where the hope of finding a better place to live is held out as part of the dominant global imaginary – countries across the globe are now attempting to manage the global flow of non-citizens. Here the visceral immediacy of human needs and hopes is confronted by the abstracting machinery of state surveillance and management. This chapter explores the tensions between the continuing embodied movement of those who seek refuge and the intensifying abstraction of state engagement with those persons. The chapter takes three liberal democracies as its focus – Australia, Canada, and the United States. These are settler colonial countries which we might expect to be cosmopolitan and welcoming. The history of refugee reception is, however, a movement away from that sensibility.

The intense search for security has, over the past half-century, become increasingly contradictory in the context of the current global unsettling. The techno-scientific search for increased security is now generating circles of increasing insecurity. This chapter is concerned to understand the foundational unsettling of that world space and its consequences for human security in general, including increasing ontological insecurity. The earliest and most dramatic example of this process is the nuclear revolution. With the dropping of the atomic bomb on civilians towards the end of World War II, the search for an ultimate weapon of mass destruction that would end the war created the conditions for escalating insecurity. The chapter documents elements of this process but, more importantly, seeks to broaden the usual emphasis, drawing the mechanics of military security into encompassing questions of human security (see also Chapter 8 on human security). The chapter draws parallels between the areas of nuclear security, anti-terrorist security, drone assassinations, and biosecurity to document the unsettling of the meaning and practice of contemporary global attempts to securitise.

What are the core capacities that make for a flourishing life? It is an incredibly difficult question to answer. Every philosopher, public commentator, and backyard critic seems to have a different view on the matter. Occasionally the terms of what makes for a good life are developed explicitly, but mostly the grounding of such claims is either left implicit or undeveloped, as if we all agree and spelling out the terms of a good life is unnecessary. In the Global North, the most common appeals assume some variation on the capacities for freedom, connectivity, democracy, and inclusion, with the ideology of freedom usually prevailing. The dominant approach to human development, called the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum and expressed in the Human Development Index, appeals to these liberal notions. This chapter sets out an alternative framework for understanding human capacities. It builds a matrix of capacities around the domains of vitality, relationality, productivity, and sustainability. These are seen as basic to a flourishing human condition.

The chapter sets out a framework for understanding the manifold crisis of the human–planetary condition. It argues that this crisis condition goes far beyond the climate crisis. Most critics tend to focus on particular issues or measurable trends rather than the abnegations of human and planetary flourishing. More pointedly, the accumulating literature rarely addresses the grounding conditions of the crisis condition nor its broader consequences for being human. Rarely do commentators set out clear pathways to the alternative possibilities. Accordingly, this chapter explores three main processes as shifting the terms of the human condition: abstraction, reconstitution, and unsettling. First, it suggests that we are materially abstracting social life, fundamentally remaking relations between people, and between persons and their worlds. Second, we are reconstituting the elements of nature and culture, including our own nature and the dominant forms of social life. And third, we are relativising the deepest structures of human practice and meaning in such ways as to change the nature of our social being. This confluence adds up to a great unsettling of the human condition.

This chapter brings the book to a close by reflecting the complexity of contemporary local–global relations, focusing on questions of positive relationality, sustainability, productivity, and vitality. It responds to the compounding crisis of our time, a manifold crisis which encompasses processes of ecological, economic, political, and cultural unsettling. The argument presented here is that a manifesto for positive local–global relations needs to confront the contemporary human condition in all its interconnected crises and wonders. It needs to be able to project into the future as well as provide guidance for present activities. And it needs to remain a heuristic and negotiable framework for continuing dialogue over principles rather be fixed as a set of edicts or targets. Rather than providing a blueprint for change, the chapter presents manifesto making as a method. Nevertheless, it presents a series of fundamental principles that are suggestive for rethinking the present human condition.

Global patterns of political violence and war have changed across the course of the twentieth into the twenty-first century. We have seen the decline of inter-state wars – Ukraine being a testing exception – and the emergence of localised transnational conflict. At the same time, modern reconciliation processes have been globalised with a particular institutional form, usually conducted under the auspices of a nation-state. This chapter examines the mismatch between these forms. It asks whether a nation-based approach can adequately respond to local–global violence. It argues not for replacing national forums of reconciliation but for reframing them in terms of a new emphasis on global–local reconciliation forums. This will entail an understanding of the way in which contemporary social life is lived across different levels of integration and spatial extension. It requires a recognition that in the contemporary world we are seeing the continuing clash of ontologically different ways of life – customary, traditional, modern, and postmodern – and that this needs a different kind of cultural and political sensitivity than that offered by modern juridical proceduralism.