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881. Isher Ahluwalia on India in the Global Economy

Author:
Nermeen Shaikh
Publication Date:
02-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Asia Society
Abstract:
Isher Ahluwalia is currently the Vice Chairperson of the Planning Board of the Government of Punjab, India and Member of the National Manufacturing Competitiveness Council, Government of India. Dr. Ahluwalia is also Chairperson of the Board of Governors of the Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations (ICRIER), a research institute based in New Delhi. She had earlier served as ICRIER's Director and Chief Executive from 1997-2001. Dr. Ahluwalia was a Visiting Professor at the School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland--College Park in 2002 and 2003. She received her B.A. from Presidency College at Calcutta University, her M.A. from the Delhi School of Economics, and her Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, all in economics. This interview with AsiaSource was conducted on February 2nd, 2006, while Dr. Ahluwalia was in New York for the Asia Society panel discussion on Encyclopedic India: Ancient Cultures and New Opportunities.
Topic:
International Relations, Economics, and Globalization
Political Geography:
New York, India, Asia, New Delhi, Punjab, and Calcutta

882. Economic Size Trumps All Else? Lessons from BRICSAM

Author:
Timothy Shaw, Andrew F. Cooper, and Agata Antkiewicz
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI)
Abstract:
Continuing CIGI's BRICSAM research, this paper questions whether size (economic or population) of emerging economies alone is enough to warrant accommodation in the rules and structures of the international system. The global realignment of states following the resulting power vacuum brought on by the end of the Cold War is finally materializing, as a new triangular formation has taken shape: the 'first world' club of the OECD; the 'second world' of emerging economies; and, a heterogeneous 'third world' of the rest. The interplay between and mobility among these groups of states deserves in-depth analysis. The core of this paper observes the economic and social trends of countries in the second tier, and their upwards aspirations towards the top-tier of the global architecture. Traced through a variety of indices, the growth of the BRICSAM group of countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, ASEAN-4 and Mexico) is demonstrated to be a powerful force in international economics and political economy. For the inclusion of these states, a change in the key aspects of global economic governance, the international architecture and geopolitics seems inevitable, and with it, new challenges arise for decision-makers and scholars alike.
Topic:
Cold War, Development, Economics, and Globalization
Political Geography:
Russia, China, India, South Africa, Brazil, and Mexico

883. Techno-Religious Imaginaries: On the Spiritual Telegraph and the Circum-Atlantic World of the 19th Century

Author:
Jeremy Stolow
Publication Date:
03-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Whether looking at matters of invention and design, of distribution and ownership, or of reception and use, popular histories of technology are typically framed within one of two meta-narratives: the optimistic or the dystopian. In the former case, technologies are seen as benign instruments that fulfill the needs, intentions, and desires of their human users. An extreme form of such technophilia can be found in the pages of the American magazine Wired, and among techno-gurus such as Nicholas Negroponte, who wax poetic about an imminent world populated by therapeutic Barbie dolls, selfcleaning shirts, driverless cars, and a range of devices enabling immediate access to inexhaustible supplies of media and information. This optimism has a considerable progeny, one root of which might be traced back to early modern European conceptions of the mechanical order of nature, and its susceptibility to ever-advancing human powers of inspection and rational design. In this tradition, technology is a pliable handmaiden to the forward march of history, taking such forms as the Haussmannized city, the Macadamized countryside, the prosthetically enhanced body, or the digitized archive. On the other hand, there is a tradition of thinking about technology, such as one finds in the philosophical writings of Martin Heidegger or Jacques Ellul, which is both dystopian and technophobic. Here one is presented with a vision of technology as an autonomous, self-directed realm, indifferent and impervious to our feeble calls for restraint, democratic control, or humane purpose. In this scheme, modern technologies resemble juggernauts running loose in the world, devouring the natural environment, and even human bodies, and transforming them into raw materials for their own mechanical processes.
Topic:
Globalization, Religion, Science and Technology, and History
Political Geography:
America

884. 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

885. 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

886. 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

887. 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

888. Reducing Global Poverty: Encouraging Private Investment in Infrastructure

Author:
Research and Policy Committee of the Committee for Economic Development
Publication Date:
07-2006
Content Type:
Policy Brief
Institution:
The Conference Board
Abstract:
This paper builds on some of the findings and recommendations of the 2002 CED policy statement, A Shared Future: Reducing Global Poverty, which broadly examined the phenomenon known as globalization and offered a blueprint for how best to harness economic integration and political cooperation between developed and developing countries towards enhancing economic growth and combating global poverty. Encouraging Private Investment in Infrastructure evaluates various options for public-private partnerships and provides brief analyses of several successful projects in order to identify best practices.
Topic:
Globalization, Poverty, Infrastructure, and Investment
Political Geography:
Global Focus

889. Consumer Citizenship in Postnational Constellations?

Author:
Christian Joerges and Michelle Everson
Publication Date:
12-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
European Research Papers Archive
Abstract:
It is perhaps a truism to note that 'the consumer' is but a role that is played by human subjects. This insight leaves us, as lawyers, with one vital question: how can or does the legal system meaningfully rationalise its encounters with the consumer? Can it, and if so to what way, shape the act of consumption? Can it even ensure that the 'fact' of consumption translates into 'good' normative institutions.
Topic:
Economics, Globalization, and Politics
Political Geography:
Europe

890. Globalization and the Construction of Universal Human Rights

Author:
Eric K. Leonard
Publication Date:
08-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Human Rights Human Welfare (University of Denver)
Abstract:
Every human rights scholar and activist must eventually engage the question of whether a set of universal human rights exists. For international relations scholars, this is an interesting debate, whether one is immersed in human rights research or not. The reason for the interest in the question is its focus on notions of authority and rule in the international system. If one accepts that a universal understanding of human rights exists, then one accepts that the relevant actors of the international community agree to uphold a common norm or set of norms despite the obvious differences in culture and history. In essence, an investigation into universal human rights is an investigation into the normative underpinnings of our global society and the actors that construct the rules for this society. This question becomes even more interesting given the intensification of the globalization process and the increased interdependence of traditional state actors, along with the increased relevance of non-actors.
Topic:
International Relations, Civil Society, Globalization, and Human Rights