Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) and the parallel 'people's summits': Theorizing the political and democracy in international theory.

Abstract

Since 1993, only four years after its inaugural meeting, and the same year of its first meeting of heads of state in Seattle, Washington, the international economic organization known as Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) has been the site of opposition headed by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). These NGOs are concerned with issues such as human rights, gender, labour rights, migrant rights, democracy, and the environment. Almost every year the scope and sophistication of the opposition has grown. In order to account for this opposition, the thesis develops an alternative interdisciplinary perspective through the work of authors such as Claude Lefort, Enersto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Derrida, and William Connolly. The thesis argues that APEC represents more than merely the outcome of interstate relations and/or economic globalization. Rather, its discourse contains representations of identity which obscure difference. This political move of APEC's discourse creates an antagonism to which respond the parallel NGO forums. In responding to this antagonism the NGO discourse opens the possibility for a deterritorialization of democracy. In order to envision this deterritorialization the thesis further argues that one must appropriate the theoretical vantage point of a model of 'agonistic democratic politics'.