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Begin New Search Topic Globalization Publishing Institution Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University

11. Has Financial Internationalization Turned into Financial Globalization?

Author:
Samir Saul
Publication Date:
04-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Money-capital has crossed state borders in increasing amounts since the nineteenth century. Understood as internationalization, this phenomenon has been a feature of the world economy for some time. Globalization is more complex and encompassing. It posits an intensification, a deepening and a multiplication of forward and backward links between units of a global economy. Financial globalization "is an aggregate concept that refers to increasing global linkages created through crossborder financial flows" (Prasad et al. 2003, 2). It includes uniformity of practices and liberalization — in this instance, the removal of legal barriers and regulatory restrictions to international financial flows. It assumes integration of markets, mobility of actors, interconnectedness, and multilateral relations. Historically, financial internationalization has meant largely unidirectional movement of capital from relatively capital-rich to relatively capital-poor countries. Financial globalization implies multidirectional mobility, cross-investments, as well as reciprocal back-and-forth movement of capital between investor and recipient economies.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and International Trade and Finance

12. Global Civil War and Post-colonial Studies

Author:
Heike Härting
Publication Date:
05-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
This essay addresses the lack of a post-colonial critique of emerging political and cultural theories of global war (Hardt and Negri 2004; Kaldor 2001; Held 2003; Clark 2003). With the exception of Paul Gilroy's study Postcolonial Melancholia (2005) and Gayatri Spivak's essay "Terror: A Speech After 9- 11," which in part examine how discourses of racialized violence legitimize contemporary global wars and their "extreme" "civilizing mission" (Spivak 2004, 82), post-colonial theorists have so far been reluctant to engage in a sustained critique of global warfare. On the one hand, this reluctance might derive from the field's preferred critical engagement, as Tim Brennan observes, with Eurocentrism rather than questions of "military occupation" (2004, 132). On the other, such a reluctance seems surprising given that post-colonial studies is traditionally concerned with the ways in which past and contemporary forms of imperial, colonial, and racialized violence have shaped present subjectivities and political, economic, and social relationships. More importantly, the task of post-colonial studies remains the unsettling of contemporary configurations of what Diana Brydon identifies as "imperial and colonial habits of mind" (1995, 10-11), and along with David Goldberg and Ato Quayson, the "dismantling of the conditions that produce [social] violence and anguish" (2002, xiii). Thus, a critical post-colonial anatomy of the social and cultural logic of global civil warfare would seem intrinsic to the field's traditional research concerns. More specifically, while, amongst many others, such theorists and writers as Frantz Fanon, Edward Said, Ngugi Wa Thiongo, Anne McClintock, Wole Soyinka, Ken Saro Wiva, and Bapsi Sidhwa have written extensively about civil and communal warfare, they have done so in the context of particular anti-colonial liberation struggles and post-colonial and neo-colonial nation formation. In part, these writers' works underlie but are not sufficiently acknowledged as a constitutive force in the articulation of dominant contemporary notions of global civil war.
Topic:
Civil War, Globalization, Post Colonialism, and Terrorism

13. Strangers as Enemies: Further Reflections on the Aporias of Transnational Citizenship

Author:
Étienne Balibar
Publication Date:
05-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
These new reflections on the issue of "transnational citizenship" and its aporias, which I have the possibility to submit for discussion owing to the generous invitation of the Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition at McMaster University, will be presented from a European point of view, as I have done in previous essays on the same subject. But I will try to do so also in the perspective of a comparison, or better said, a confrontation, with North America, of which you are part, and where I have been working now regularly for years, albeit across the border. I do not believe in the possibility of speaking about "the global" from a point of view itself "global" -- that is, from nowhere or everywhere. But I believe in the (relative) possibility of dis-locating one's point of view, one's place of enunciation, and above all of exposing oneself to the dis-location that comes from others.
Topic:
Civil Society, Globalization, Government, International Political Economy, and Nationalism
Political Geography:
America and North America

14. Empire Writes Back: Between Dreams of Trespass and Fantasies of Resistance

Author:
Alina Sajed
Publication Date:
11-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
This paper attempts to address the issues of what is at stake in reading between East and West, and how orality might pose a challenge to the legitimized academic views of doing research and of attaining knowledge. Indeed, I find myself situated somewhere in the middle between East and West. I come from an Eastern European country, in which the mélange of Western and Eastern elements can be confusing at best. Romanian culture (if one can talk of a unified and homogeneous cultural system which would bear the unambiguous mark of Romanian-ness) has been profoundly influenced both by its Eastern neighbours (influence which sometimes materialized into lengthy occupation by the Ottoman Empire) and by Western ideas and practices that have been imported both by foreign travellers and by the local intelligentsia. Boasting rich and captivating oral traditions, Romanian culture has also been under the tyranny of the written sign. It has sometimes tried to negotiate between the two, but not without doing violence to the richness of the former, while acknowledging the modern necessity and superior expediency of the latter.
Topic:
Globalization, Politics, and Post Colonialism
Political Geography:
Europe and Romania

15. The Origins of Global Civil Society and Non-Territorial Governance: Some Empirical Reflections

Author:
William D. Coleman and Sarah Wayland
Publication Date:
02-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
In contemporary discussions of global governance, many scholars have posited the possibility that networks of new social movements, publicly-oriented non-governmental organizations (NGOs), and other non-state actors have the potential to create pressures for increased transparency and accountability. A more legitimate democratic global politics would follow. Such networks are often seen to be the base of “global civil society”. Understanding the origins of global civil society is important if we are to assess well its possible contribution to addressing the challenge of global democratic governance in an era of globalization. In this paper, we evaluate two different views about the origins of global civil society. The first suggests that global civil society has been developing rationally over a long period of time, continuous with the development of domestic civil society in democracies. The second postulates global civil society to be a relatively new phenomenon, one that has emerged to respond to unprecedented challenges to democracy as a result of globalization.
Topic:
International Relations, Agriculture, Civil Society, Globalization, International Political Economy, Non-Governmental Organization, and Science and Technology

16. Monetary Power and Political Autonomy: Exchange Rate Policymaking in Follower States

Author:
Louis W. Pauly
Publication Date:
03-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Common sense suggests that successful leaders need willing followers. Coercion can sometimes be effective, but even the most inexperienced parent soon learns the lesson that results achieved through unforced acquiescence tend to be better and more enduring than those achieved through the application of brute force. Political theorists typically focus on the concept of legitimacy when they evoke the quality that transforms raw power into something more acceptable to its target. Clearly implicated by that concept is another one, even more difficult to measure: respect for the ultimate autonomy of the target. In an era of rapid global transformation, when the exercise of great power is readily observable, research nevertheless proliferates on the meaning and nature of independence, of sovereignty, and of political autonomy (for an overview see Grande and Pauly 2005).
Topic:
Economics, Foreign Exchange, and Globalization

17. From the Discourse of "Sino-West" to "Globalization": Chinese Perspectives on Globalization

Author:
Yu Keping
Publication Date:
03-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
“Globalization” has become a fashionable term, and is itself as globalized as McDonald's, the Internet and the film Titanic. So wherever in the West or the East, in developing or developed countries, or in capitalist or socialist countries, people are talking about “globalization,” so too are they doing in China. All popular theories in the West tend to have repercussions in China sooner or later, as the examples of modernization theory, postmodern theory and globalization theory demonstrate. Modernization theory, which prevailed in the West in the 1950s and 1960s, did not become popular in China until the 1980s, while globalization theory, which came to prominence in the West in the early 1990s, has been a hot topic in China since the mid-1990s. This fact itself is a good indicator that globalization has been an inevitable trend shaping the development process of the world, including China. Having introduced reforms that open the country's economy to the world markets, and as an active member of the international community, China is necessarily facing the effects of globalization. As a result, Chinese politicians and scholars are posing questions about how to respond to the challenges and opportunities that globalization presents.
Topic:
Globalization
Political Geography:
China and Asia

18. The Elusive Basis of Legitimacy in Global Governance: Three Conceptions

Author:
Steven Bernstein
Publication Date:
05-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
The Elusive Basis of Legitimacy in Global Governance: Three Conceptions How to create and maintain legitimacy is arguably the greatest contemporary challenge to global governance and international order. To address this challenge, International Relations scholars, accustomed to a clear distinction between international and domestic legitimacy, have had to borrow extensively from the fields of political philosophy, comparative politics, law, and sociology, which have long investigated the legitimate basis of political authority. These traditions inform three distinct conceptions of legitimacy in this new wave of scholarship: 1) principled legitimacy rooted in democratic politics; 2) legitimacy as law or legalization; and 3) a sociological conception of legitimacy rooted in intersubjective beliefs about appropriateness. Each conception provides only partial insight into the core puzzle animating this literature: what does political authority beyond the state require? The answer can only be found through an examination of the relationship of power, legitimacy, and community, which together constitute political authority.
Topic:
International Relations, Globalization, Government, and International Political Economy

19. Competition, Contracts and Privatization: Globalization and Public Administration in Developing Countries

Author:
Ahmed Shafiqul Huque
Publication Date:
09-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Public administration actors, institutions and processes came under severe criticism in most states, as they seemed to be increasingly inappropriate for performing the tasks expected of them. Western developed nations moved to alleviate the problems by introducing reforms in the public sector. Initially, the reforms aimed at cutting cost in the provision of public services and reducing the size of the bureaucracy. Subsequently, the reforms also attempted to usher in changes in the approach and attitude, and more radical solutions were considered, including the overhaul of public sector organizations and the introduction of market principles.
Topic:
Emerging Markets, Globalization, Politics, and Privatization

20. Globalizing Hope: The Resonance of Zapatismo and the Political Imagination(s) of Transnational Activism

Author:
Alex Khasnabish
Publication Date:
12-2004
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
“The new distribution of the world excludes 'minorities'. The indigenous, youth, women, homosexuals, lesbians, people of color, immigrants, workers, peasants; the majority who make up the world basements are presented, for power, as disposable. The new distribution of the world excludes the majorities.
Topic:
Globalization, Politics, and Political Theory
Political Geography:
Mexico