Sassen's "Third Space": please support openDemocracy

Dear Readers, Supporters and Members,

It has been a real pleasure asking supporters for a quote and a link and posting these up on the site - it is a surprisingly lonely business, editing a magasine/web-site like openDemocracy. Of course, there is a great deal of talk and debate within the editorial team and with authors. We also have our appreciated and often regular commenters. But we can tell from the web server stats that we don't actually talk to 99% of the readers of oD. So it has been great to hear from some of you - please keep the comments and links coming in.

The diversity of the group that has written in with a comment - from Tbilisi to Sydney, from Prime Minister's adviser to student - made me think of the the "third spaces" that Saskia Sassen has characterised in her most recent article for us. Her articles, I find, make their full impact on me felt slowly - months later, I have a thought that I trace back to something she has written - a seed well planted. This article, I think, will do the same thing. She points out the common factor uniting: Sao Paulo drug gangs; groups of construction firms setting a trans-national building standard; the International Criminal Court; Vicente Fox in his meeting of Mexican "foreign aliens" in the USA... These are all "third spaces": neither national nor supra-national. They are the cross-national currents that are weakening both nations and institutions like the IMF, WTO or UN. Saskia Sassen sees in them the future we are moving towards - the "globalisation 1.0" of the last 20 years was just a staging post to a complex world of these "third spaces".

Back to the diversity of quotes and comments: I'd like openDemocracy to be one of these "Third Spaces". Not identified with any one national perspective; not promoting any simple internationalist set of institutions, but always looking for the particular, for the specific ways that social organisation can promote human flourishing. And always also alert for the ways that uncontrolled power can destroy those particular flowerings.

In the meantime, please help us maintain oD's independence, and help us make this "third space" strong, wise and vibrant by donating in our "Think Long Term" campaign.

Best wishes,


Tony Curzon Price

PS - Some of you may be frustrated at the continued trouble I've had getting the links to work in these emails. I can tell you that I am! Please bear with me.