Sedimented orientations to the concept of globalization today often rest on a technocratic triumphalism—“time-space compression”—made possible by emerging technologies, “flows” of various kinds transforming “-scapes” they transit and shape, capital straining toward unfettered freedom stalking new markets and shaping governance possibilities, the movement of humanity facilitated by infrastructure, and cities that serve as pulsating nodes of a global order. Not only does this triumphalist vision exclude vast swathes of the globe, it draws on a set of ideologies and ontologies from the West to represent global pasts, presents, and futures to all. These exclusions and focal points are not just coincidental, but mutually constituting. With attention to two topics often situated within globalization imaginaries—mobility discourses and sport ideologies—this chapter engages Pacific worldviews of movement to probe the limits of globalization as a conceptual framework. Focusing on strands of what becomes obscured as global movement, it suggests that adopting a kaleidoscopic approach attentive to historical contingency, transnational connections, place, and competing ontologies helps us to understand better the dynamics of our time.
How can debates about the future directions of globalization be best advanced, particularly those concerning the interchange of bodies and objects from refugees and tourists to body parts and viruses, when global relations are mediated through disembodying technologies from data platforms and digitalized surveillance to biomedicine?From the other side, how are we best to understand processes through which more embodied processes of globalization all tend to be managed, surveyed, and controlled through those more abstracted mechanisms of technological mediation?This chapter elaborates a methodologically consistent way of answering those questions.It investigates the tensions between these different forms of social interchange, arguing that disembodied globalization is now the dominant form of globalization, and is likely to be into the future.By exploring themes of embodiment, including human reproduction, sexual identity, vaccination, and genetic engineering, the chapter seeks to show how technoscientific intervention associated with ideologies of overcoming bodily constraint are remaking what it means to be human.
The current moment in world capitalism is defined by three key developments.First, the system has become universal through globalization processes that date to the late twentieth century.Second, the system is undergoing a new round of restructuring and transformation based on a much more advanced digitalization and financialization of the entire global economy and society.Third, the system faces an unprecedented capitalist crisis that is as much economic, or structural, one of overaccumulation, as it is political, one of state legitimacy and capitalist hegemony.This crisis is also existential because of the threat of ecological collapse as well as the renewed threat of nuclear war and the danger of future pandemics that may involve much deadlier microbes than coronaviruses.Despite much talk of "deglobalization" and the breakdown of global supply chains in the wake of the coronavirus economic meltdown, world trade reached a record high in 2021.Transnational elites are pinning their hopes on a new wave of capitalist expansion and prosperity through digitally driven restructuring.Even if a new period of digitally driven expansion displaces the structural crisis temporally into the future, global capitalism will continue to generate social crises of survival and well-being for billions of people.
This chapter first discusses the lack of consensus on how to define deglobalization, a term that is likely to become the buzzword of the mid-twenty-first century. There are at least three different accounts of deglobalization. First, deglobalization is defined as a series of processes that serve to “reverse” globalization. Second, deglobalization is celebrated as an emancipatory project decentering the West and aiming at reglobalization. Third, from a historical perspective, deglobalization is understood as a temporary phase or “wave” that is constitutive of global polity. Then, the chapter focuses on the popular indices and measurements of globalization that are employed to better grasp the current state of globalization and predict whether it will be replaced by deglobalization. While quantitative measurement and indices serve to provide the “big picture” in terms of comparing hundreds of nation-states across certain (economic, political, social, and technological) dimensions of globalizations, they attract much criticism, not only for their methodological nationalism, but also for overlooking the complex, nonmeasurable aspects of globalization.
Africa is a continent with vast human and material resources, but its progress towards sustainable development has been slow and sometimes discouraging. Some of its challenges have stemmed from its insertion into the global economy and accompanying power structures from at least the fifteenth century. As the continent’s economic progression has not reflected the full value of its assets, Africa houses alarming numbers of impoverished people and nations today. Even as these groups battle political and economic instability, the COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted additional burdens. As a developing continent, Africa must leverage its strengths and match the trajectory of a globalized economy that promises genuine and sustainable development. However, several challenges have created bottlenecks that hinder this agenda, which this work seeks to explore further. This chapter considers the interactions between globalization and sustainable development in Africa, including its state before globalization, the promises of sustainable development, and the benefits globalization and sustainable development may bring to Africa.
The 2011 Arab Spring protests took place amidst the Great Recession, with limited or declining foreign direct investments in the region, rising food prices, high rates of unemployment (especially among youth), and low public and private investments. In 2014, oil prices fell. At the same time, the fallout from the 2003–4 U.S./UK invasion and occupation of Iraq, the NATO invasion of Libya, and the attempts to destabilize the Syrian regime helped spawn the so-called Islamic State, which wreaked havoc on communities in Iraq and Syria and had spillover effects in Tunisia. Hailed as the one democratic outcome of the Arab Spring protests, Tunisia began to unravel economically and politically, as it amassed a large debt burden, was unable to reduce high youth unemployment, and then faced the 2020–21 COVID-19 pandemic. As the latest stage of capitalism, neoliberal globalization turned out to be not the great equalizer that its early proponents claimed, but rather something closer to a wrecking ball. This chapter contributes to the literature on globalization’s dimensions and evolution through application to the Arab region and the Tunisian case study. Concepts from Marxist and world-systems theories will elucidate the promises and perils of neoliberal capitalist globalization as experienced in a democratizing polity.
In our digital age, virtual migration—workers providing transnational services without the physical mobility of workers’ bodies—has become an essential component of globalization. This chapter draws on transnational online educational platforms connecting contractors in North America with young English learners in China, especially ABCKID (pseudonym), to explore how virtual migrants from developed countries provide services to customers in developing countries. Using in-depth interviews, surveys, and online data, I illustrate how ABCKID has mobilized highly mobile and highly immobile social groups that were previously marginalized by various labor markets—military wives, digital nomads, and stay-at-home moms in the United States and Canada—to join the platform, and thus expand the pool of virtual migrants. The alignment between these virtual migrants’ motivations to overcome labor-market constraints and the characteristics of ABCKID jobs has not only prompted them to join the platform but also brought them immense job satisfaction. Although this platform dislocates contractors from their local contexts, contractors from these social groups have found meaning in their jobs. I discuss how mobilizing these formerly marginalized social groups into virtual migrants has facilitated the transition of globalization forms, while clouding and justifying the control and surveillance of digital globalization. I also discuss the impact of this transition on the direction of globalization and global inequality.
This chapter explores contradictory dynamics of the recent, current, and future prospects of globalization revealed by the COVID pandemic of 2019–22. Situating the analysis in the COVID-19 pandemic world, it examines how the COVID-driven process shaped/shifted ideals about community, belonging, and security organized around the citizen/nation/state trio in a globalized international system. It contends that the COVID pandemic may have stirred or animated simultaneously centrifugal nationalisms within the Western world and the richer countries, resulting in neopopulist policies and protectionist measures. It also argues that these same policies, exposing the structural precarities around the world, particularly acutely in the Global South, will likely fuel centripetal migrations across the globe. In the end, however, the chapter argues, both dynamics will likely further globalization, for both are a priori bound up with (and within) the already globalized productive infrastructure, composed of digital and knowledge industries, manufacturing and transportation sectors, and trade and finance institutions. Ultimately, it suggests that globalization is here to stay, though taking on different forms as evinced during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Since the 1990s, scholars in the Euro-American academy have debated and analyzed the causes and consequences of globalization.However, in the dominant and most cited literature, scholars have rarely engaged with globalization's relationship to nature and the resulting process of global warming, environmental degradation, mass extinction of biodiversity, and related climate injustices.If scholars do refer to the environment at all, it is usually in vague terms of "sustainability" needed to maintain the neoliberal logics of the status quo.This essay engages with the lack of serious attention in the literature on globalization with ecological devastation leading to our current era of imminent planetary collapse.I reflect on why this has been the case and ask what the silence on nature suggests in terms of the politics of scholarly production.I argue that scholars of globalization predominantly reflect a Eurocentric and anthropocentric perspective informed by Enlightenment thought that includes a human/nature binary and the logics of progress, modernity, and resource extractivism.This blinkered worldview both assumes the dominance of Western-based scholarship and precludes an urgent need to think more holistically about humanity's deeply entangled global futures with more-than-human worlds.I conclude that this dominant northern worldview and its embedded limitations herald the looming irrelevancy of globalization theory produced within the Euro-American academy.
In investigating and discussing the limitations and abstraction of “big data” quantitative measurement as a new capitalistic mode of operation that colonizes people’s perception of the world, the study settles on a qualitative “small data” approach to understand change. Thus, by means of digital ethnographic fieldwork and an alternative media aesthetics framework, assisted by the method of global iconology, the chapter aims to reassess globalization as a visual-ideological phenomenon. Specifically, it investigates how the “reglobalization” of the world is mediated under present conditions of image domination. It does so by focusing on Instagram visual social media cultures and the role that transnational digital media elites play in the destabilization of the imagined multipolar world order we live in. In adding nuance to an understanding of how capitalism is restructured and mediated in the era of computer vision, machine learning, and pattern recognition algorithms, the study will also speculate on the imperialistic role transnational media corporations play and on the possibility that they may, or may not, contribute to the rise of a global media order.
