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Begin New Search Publishing Institution Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University Publication Year within 25 Years

21. 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

22. 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

23. 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

24. Globalized Islam: Arab Identity Sous Rature

Author:
Salam Hawa
Publication Date:
06-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
A combination of the current “global war on terror” and political developments in the Middle East has brought forth deep interest in what scholars have identified as the “Arab Condition,” which recognizes the lack of political autonomy of Arab countries, whose citizens are seen to suffer from political disengagement and a lack of coherent political identity that is based on shared language, culture, and history (articles by Edward Said in Al-Ahram Weekly Online 22-28 May 2003; 21-27 August 2003). Alternate analyses view this absence of political identity from a religious (as opposed to linguistic/cultural) perspective, believing it to be at the base of the radicalization of Islamic religion, which has been responsible for the upsurge in terrorist activities around the globe (Ajami 1992; 1998; Wall Street Journal, 28 March 2004; Lewis 2002; 2003). It has been successfully argued (Bennison 2002; Roy 2004) that the Islamic ummah (collective Islamic identity) was at the basis of a global system until the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century. However, little or no work has been undertaken to study the complex relation that exists between language/culture and religious affiliation, more particularly for the Arab-speaking nations whose language is directly identified with the doctrines and laws of Islam. As a result, in attempting to understand the current political climate, lines drawn between what is Islamic, what is Arabic, and what is indeed a combination of the two have often been blurred, adding confusion to what has hitherto been a relatively unfamiliar religion and culture in the West.
Topic:
Islam and Politics
Political Geography:
Middle East and Arabia

25. Autonomy and Domination within the Global Trade System: Developing Countries in the Quest for a Democratic WTO

Author:
Anna Lanoszka
Publication Date:
10-2006
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Power relations shape the world economy. The system of international economic transactions has been persistently asymmetrical as it consists of highly industrialized states as well as of many poorer countries at different levels of economic development. The dominant position of the rich developed countries cannot be simply assumed away, even in the rules-based World Trade Organization (WTO) guided by the principles of international law.
Topic:
International Relations, International Political Economy, International Trade and Finance, Treaties and Agreements, and World Trade Organization

26. 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

27. 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

28. 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

29. On Autonomy and Law

Author:
Natalia Loukacheva
Publication Date:
06-2005
Content Type:
Working Paper
Institution:
Institute on Globalization and the Human Condition, McMaster University
Abstract:
Extensive scholarly works on the issue of autonomy and indigenous self-governance show that legal concepts of autonomy suffer from much confusion. In the following study, I present a survey of the concept of governance in the legal scholarship in attempting to develop normative grounds for the right to autonomy. This paper is divided into two parts. At the outset it deals with general considerations of theoretical aspects of the concept of autonomy in public law1 and examines the extent to which the right to autonomy can be defined and justified in light of international and comparative constitutional legislation.
Topic:
Human Rights, International Law, and Sovereignty

30. 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