Conceptualizing Politics

particular, does not stand up to the lethal threats that undermine them even more 
than economic globalisation. Rather than complaints over ‘de-democratisation’, a 
profound and innovative shift in the theory and culture of democracy is required.

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New realities require new concepts, while these are supposed to generate clarity 
in our otherwise confused look into the new realities confronting us. This is why 
I have introduced (Cerutti 2007) the concept of global challenge, a philosophical 
concept that intends to break with the common parlance use of these words. I have 
seen later that the adjective was not telling enough to define the concept, and have 
modified the language highlighting the severity of the challenges, which are global 
and lethal at the same time. Global challenges are therefore not an array of things, 
but only those that meet the following conceptual standards: lethal, physical, and 
man-made threats that can hit everybody on earth and can be addressed with some chance of 
success only by the joint effort of all peoples or countries.
Lethal for whom? They endanger the survival of civilisation rather than the bio-
logical existence of the human race, although this danger cannot be excluded in the 
case of a large nuclear war followed from a worldwide nuclear winter. Civilisation in 
what sense? Not as a lofty treasure of values and ideals, but as the set of social and 
technical institutions (agriculture, trade, communication, plus the legal and political 
conditions that uphold their regulation and protection) that enable the human race, 
which lack any specialised organ, to survive on the planet.
But why the stress on ‘physical’ and ‘man-made’ or anthropogenic? Because the 
physical nature of the threats makes them not dependent on any questionable the-
ory of society, obligation, salvation or justice, and subject only to state-of-the-art 
methods of scientific discovery and verification. Why this may become important 
will emerge later. Also, the anthropogenic nature of global challenges is funda-
mental because it does not only open the chance (nothing more than a chance) of 
working on them, but also underlines how relevant they are for reinterpreting, now 
on a global scale – humankind’s contribution to good and evil, in other words for 
reassessing the relationship of politics and morality. As noted above on more than 
one occasion, what worldview we have in mind is far from indifferent to the way 
we act politically.
PART II
Global/lethal challenges: politics after 
modernity

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The globalised world  135
Global challenges seem to contain a compelling push toward solidarity and coop-
eration in the global dimension, this being the main reason why defining and high-
lighting them has become relevant to politics and political philosophy – though 
political philosophers have hardly taken note of them as philosophical issues. Exam-
ining that reason, we will also get out of any ambivalent interchangeability between 
threat and challenge and speak more exactly of challenges only as far as a scientifically 
verified threat is taken into consideration by politics and treated as a challenge politics 
has to stand up to. How large the range of that push may become cannot be discussed 
before we have applied our definitions to the items that seem to fall under them.
After analysing in §4 the characteristics of global and lethal challenges, we shall 
address their impact on future generations (§5), politics (§6) and democracy (§7).