In Emanuel Adler's distinctive constructivist approach to international relations theory, international practices evolve in tandem with collective knowledge of the material and social worlds. This book - comprising a selection of his journal publications, a new introduction and three previously unpublished articles - points IR constructivism in a novel direction, characterized as 'communitarian'. Adler's synthesis does not herald the end of the nation-state; nor does it suggest that agency is unimportant in international life. Rather, it argues that what mediates between (...) individual and state agency and social structures are communities of practice, which are the wellspring and repositories of collective meanings and social practices. The concept of communities of practice casts new light on epistemic communities and security communities, helping to explain why certain ideas congeal into human practices and others do not, and which social mechanisms can facilitate the emergence of normatively better communities. (shrink)

Cosmopolitics, the concept of a world politics based on shared democratic values, is in an increasingly fragile state.

A major issue in political philosophy is the extent to which one or another version of nationalism or, by contrast, cosmopolitanism, is morally justified. Nationalism, like cosmopolitanism, may be understood as a position on the status and responsibilities of nation states, but the terms may also be used to designate attitudes appropriate to those positions. One problem in political philosophy is to distinguish and appraise various forms of nationalism and cosmopolitanism; a related problem is how to understand the relation of (...) patriotism to each. Nationalists may tend to be patriots, but need not be; patriots may tend to be nationalists, but need not be. Like nationalism, patriotism may also be considered in propositional forms or in related attitudinal forms; but unlike nationalism and cosmopolitanism, patriotism can exist in the form of an emotion: roughly, love of one’s country. This paper characterizes nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and patriotism in both forms and argues for a conception of patriotism on which it is both distinct from nationalism and compatible with certain kinds of cosmopolitanism. It also suggests that, in qualified forms, nationalism and cosmopolitanism may overlap in what they require of their proponents. (shrink)

This book offers a contemporary critique of liberal democracy, understood as a set of institutions and as a set of ideas.

My project here is to argue for situating moral judgments about Indian surrogacy in the context of Reproductive Justice. I begin by crafting the best picture of Indian surrogacy available to me while marking some worries I have about discursive colonialism and epistemic honesty. Western feminists' responses to contract pregnancy fall loosely into two interrelated moments: post-Baby M discussions that focus on the morality of surrogacy work in Western contexts, and feminist biomedical ethnographies that focus on the lived dimensions of (...) reproductive technologies and how they are embodied and negotiated in specific cultural contexts. Both approaches have their shortcomings. Uncritically extending Western moral frameworks (for example, liberal feminist political values) to Indian surrogacy work raises the specter of discursive colonialism; with it, worries arise about how Western normative traditions can distort, erase, or misread non-Western subjects' lived experiences. Feminist biomedical ethnographic approaches correct this, but raise the specter of a weak moral absenteeism; with it, concerns arise about under-theorizing the structural harms and injustices shaping surrogacy worker's lives. I suggest that we might reduce these shortcomings by framing normative and ethnographic engagement with global surrogacy as questions of reproductive justice. (shrink)

Many assert that affluent countries have contributed in the past to poverty in developing countries through wars of aggression and conquest, colonialism and its legacies, the imposition of puppet leaders, and support for brutal dictators and venal elites. Thomas Pogge has recently argued that there is an additional and, arguably, even more consequential way in which the affluent continue to contribute to poverty in the developing world. He argues that when people cooperate in instituting and upholding institutional arrangements that foreseeably (...) result in more severe or more widespread poverty or human rights deficits than would foreseeably result under feasible alternative arrangements, they are contributors to these harms. Because of this, he argues, they have stringent, contribution-based (or negative) duties to address this poverty. We will call this the ‘Feasible Alternatives Thesis' (FAT), and our aim in this article is to examine it critically. (shrink)

In this new book, Ulrich Beck develops his now widely used concepts of second modernity, risk society and reflexive sociology into a radical new sociological ...

Adopting a long-term historical perspective, this article examines the growing complexity and the internal tensions of state protection in Western Europe and North America. Beginning with Charles Tilly's theory about state building and organized crime, the discussion follows with a critical analysis of T. H. Marshall's article on citizenship. Arguing that state protection has become far more multifaceted than what Marshall's triadic model suggests, the article shows how this protection frequently transcends the logic of individual rights while increasing the reliance (...) of citizens on the modern state. The last section formulates a critique of the idea formulated by theorists like Manuel Castells that globalization favors a rapid decline of state power. Yet, state protection may not necessarily grow indefinitely, and tax cuts, for example, the ones recently enacted in the United States, could seriously jeopardize a state's capacity to raise revenues and effectively fight older and newer forms of insecurity. (shrink)

This book combines contributions from many authors who examine a wide range of subjects ranging from overall theoretical considerations to detailed regional ...

In addressing the theme of this special issue of Business Ethics Quarterly on business ethics in the new millennium, I want to focusnot on business ethics as an academic field of study but rather on ethics in business. By ethics in business I mean the standards for ethical conduct that are generally recognized in business and the ways in which these standards are established. Ethics in business in this sense is, at least in part, what the field of business ethics (...) studies. (shrink)

Previous research on the impacts of global trade on Mexican companies showed that the family remained the basic institutional model. Since then, however, Mexico's economy has become the most open economy in Latin America with a rising percentage university-educated workers. As a middle-income country unable to provide the cheapest labor in the world, Mexico may yet benefit from globalization by entering the global knowledge economy. In semi-structured interviews with eight university-educated knowledge workers from Cuernavaca, Mexico, this exploratory study looked for (...) evidence of change and adaptation. The interviews raised questions about factors that may prolong or curtail the future pervasiveness of patriarchal business practices. It was hypothesized that merit-based hiring and promotion have become highly valued, while the social responsibility of nepotism is being questioned. The article presents several additional hypotheses about the changes that may be taking place in Mexican business practices. (shrink)

Alongside recent world-historical dates such as 11 September 2001, we would place 15 February 2003. On that day, around 10 million people—some estimates are much higher—demonstrated on the streets of the world's cities in opposition to the US war on Iraq, then being merely threatened. Sartre's study of the elements of history in Critique of Dialectical Reason and its unpublished ethical sequel, Morality and History, illuminate, and are illuminated by, the movements that contest today's global system. From the Critique, we'll (...) engage his notions of negative universality as threat of death and the "fusing" of "series" into "groups" as response. From Morality and History, we'll take "integral humanity" as a goal and standard; it seems to us built into the global act of February 15 and into the wider movement of which that day was a moment. After comparing a Sartrean take on February 15 with the famous Habermas-Derrida appeal inspired by that day, we'll close with some reciprocal illuminations between Sartre's theories and Zapatista practice. (shrink)

Globalization is hailed by its advocates as a means of spreading cosmopolitan values, ideals of sustainability and better standards of living all around the world. Its critics, however, see globalization as a new form of colonialism imposed by rich countries and transnational corporations on the rest of the world, a process in which the rhetoric of sustainability and equality does not match the realities of exploitation and impoverishment of people and nature. This paper endorses neither view. Globalization is not new, (...) but it continually produces new challenges for conceptions of 'home' and 'belonging'. While some enthusiasts regard the 'liberal' and 'environmental' values of the West as the best remedy for what is wrong with the world, others argue that a resource for resisting the destructive effects of globalization may be found in the sense of identity and importance of place found in the traditional scientific and medical traditions of both India and China. Instead of trying to merge these two views in some grand synthesis, this paper argues that traditional conservative and modern liberal values should continually interact with each other to produce novel ideas in debates about home, place and belonging. (shrink)

In a period of rapid internationalization of trade and increased labor mobility, is it relevant for nations to think about their moral obligations to others? Do national boundaries have fundamental moral significance, or do we have moral obligations to foreigners that are equal to our obligations to our compatriots? The latter position is known as cosmopolitanism, and this volume brings together a number of distinguished political philosophers and theorists to explore cosmopolitanism: what it consists in, and the positive case which (...) can be made for it. Their essays provide a comprehensive overview of both the current state of the debate and the alternative visions of cosmopolitanism with which we can move forward, and they will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy, political theory, and law. (shrink)

Some 2000 years ago, Virgil wroteThe Georgics, a political tract on Romanagriculture in the form of a poem. Today, as aresult of rising global trade in food andagricultural products, growing economicconcentration, the merging of food andpharmacy, chronic obesity in the midst ofhunger, and new disease and pest vectors, weare in need of a new Georgics that addressesthe two key issues of our time: vigilance andvoice. On the one hand, vigilance must becentral to a new Georgics. Enforceablestandards for food safety, food (...) quality,environmental protection, worker health andsafety, sanitary and phytosanitaryrequirements, animal welfare, and appellationsmust be addressed. On the other hand, a newGeorgics must increase the range of persons whohave voice in the democratic governance of anew global agrifood system. New organizationsand institutions will be needed to accomplishthis task. (shrink)

: he commercialization of biotechnology, especially research and development by transnational pharmaceutical companies, is already excessive and is increasingly dangerous to distributive justice, human rights, and access of marginal populations to basic human goods. Focusing on gene patenting, this article employs the work of Margaret Jane Radin and others to argue that gene patenting ought to be more highly regulated and that it ought to be regulated with international participation and in view of concerns about solidarity and the common good. (...) The mode of argument called for on this issue is more pragmatic than logical, emphasizing persuasion based on evidence about the reality and effects of control of genetic research by profit-driven biotech companies. (shrink)

Recent events demonstrated to the world a growing sense of interconnection and interdependence that will call for universal values and ethical behaviors on the part of journalists. In this article I look at journalism, likening this profession of inquiry to that of scientists, and I look at journalism ethics as a body of knowledge before identifying universal characteristics and suggesting that because of the many universal values that bond humans at whatever location, journalists should be able to agree on common (...) ethical principles. (shrink)

In the book under review, Walter Reese-Schafer provides a concise Introduction to the sources, themes and conclusions of the philosophy of Karl-Otto Apel, Emeritus Professor at Frankfurt and close colleague of Jurgen Habermas. There are both Kantian and Peircean themes in Apel, with the chief focus on the concept of discourse ethics.

This article reviews the globalization process and how it impacts the standards of employee relations ethics in the United States. John Dunlop's industrial relations systems framework is employed to assess how the globalization process has altered the ideology that binds the industrial relations system together and the body of rules created to govern behavior in the workplace and work community. I discuss how globalization has altered the context of industrial relations systems around the world and analyze the consequences of the (...) reduction in significance of the national context to the changing standards of employee relations ethics. I also review the significance of why national differences in the contexts of industrial relations systems relating to the technological characteristics of the workplace, the product and factor markets, and the locus of distribution and power, are disappearing and being integrated rapidly into the global economy. Additionally, the article discusses the role of multinational corporations in the globalization process and why the emerging global industrial relations system is altering the standards of employee relations ethics in the American workplace. (shrink)

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra-state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

Globalization, a process characterized by the growing interdependence of the world's people, impacts health systems and the social determinants of health in ways that are detrimental to health equity. In a world in which there are few countervailing normative and policy approaches to the dominant neoliberal regime underpinning globalization, the human rights paradigm constitutes a widely shared foundation for challenging globalization's effects. The substantive rights enumerated in human rights instruments include the right to the highest attainable level of physical and (...) mental health and others that are relevant to the determinants of health. The rights stipulated in these documents impose extensive legal obligations on states that have ratified these documents and confer health entitlements on their residents. Human rights norms have also inspired civil society efforts to improve access to essential medicines and medical services, particularly for HIV/AIDS. Nevertheless, many factors reduce the potential counterweight human rights might exert, including and specifically the nature of the human rights approach, weak political commitments to promoting and protecting health rights on the part of some states and their lack of institutional and economic resources to do so. Global economic markets and the relative power of global economic institutions are also shrinking national policy space. This article reviews the potential contributions and limitations of human rights to achieving greater equity in shaping the social determinants of health. (shrink)

Globalization has consequences for the religious sphere, but it does not constitute a break with the previous situation. It constitutes rather an acceleration of a process begun with the birth of nation-states. The impact of the values of modernity is general, since even those in power, whatever their tendency, invoke values of democracy, progress, freedom and justice, whereas submission is what was required of subjects. Nevertheless, people today look to religion for fixed reference points, because of the brutal transition from (...) the Middle Ages to the 20th and 21st centuries, and because modernity is not a endogenous phenomenon. Islam then is playing the role of bulwark against western hegemony. It is also instrumentalized both by the powers that be and by the oppositions, all of whom give themselves over to displays of one-upmanship over fidelity to Islam. Does Islam then maintain its relevance in the context of globalization? The fact is that the bases on which social relations are now founded no longer permit discrimination on the ground of sex or religion, and that there is a loosening of the grip of traditional ritualism and that more and more Muslims are looking for an understanding of the faith that is freed from old-fashioned dogmas. These new givens are being demonstrated particularly when it comes to the exercise of power and the condition of women. As a result, traditional conceptions are destined to evolve, particularly concerning the status of the Koran, the growing awareness of the historical process that made the Koran into a juridical code, the archetype that has been stuck to the person of the Prophet, and the alienation that consists in the sacralization of every human act. (shrink)

This paper examines with the use of aggregate data from the U.S. Department of Justicethe extent of contemporary white-collar crime as a consequence of multiple normative standards existing within corporations. Given the implications of globalization, the desire for increased profits, and the declining role of regulatory agencies across much of the world (save for Europe, Japan, Mexico and India), paper suggests that the incidence of corporate deviance is likely to increase in the foreseeable future.

The topic of women and globalization raises fundamental questions on the impact of globalization on women, ethnic minorities and other socio-demographically under-represented actors in global organizations. This article seeks to integrate theories of procedural justice, psychological contracts, motivation and psychological ownership in knowledge transfer in global organizations, and the implications for women, and other under-represented actors. Our analysis concurs with current research on the need for a relativist perspective in business ethics research and one that encompasses the critical processes of (...) exchange from a cognitive perspective. Our contribution is to show that globalization is a complex process, that has different impacts on actors, an impact that can vary widely depending on, whether the actors are in a dominant situation, or as in the case of women and ethnic minorities, in a relatively socio-demographic and geo-politically under represented situation. (shrink)

The first edition was awarded the '2005 Textbook Award of the Association of University Professors of Management (Verband der Hochschullehrer fur ...

This book measures the current institutional and political realities surrounding globalization against philosophical ideals.

This paper illustrates the overlap of computer ethics and business ethics by examining two issues. The first is the lack of fit between digitalized information and copyright protection. Although there are moral arguments that can be used to justify protection of intellectual property, including computer software and digitalized data, the way that copyright protection has developed often reflects vested interests rather than the considered weighing of moral considerations. As a result, with respect to downloading MP3s, among other material, what is (...) ethical is largely determined by the appropriately passed laws in each jurisdiction, and what is ethically permissible in one jurisdiction may be ethically impermissible in another. The second issue is the outsourcing of IT jobs from the U.S. While the practice has been politicized, examining it from an all-things-considered perspective, this paper argues it is ethically justified. (shrink)

Globalization presages an important new stage in the centuries-old 'civilizing process,' which Norbert Elias analyzed with such clarity and in such depth. At the root of the fundamental transformations of our world of nation-states are combined integrating and disintegrating tendencies, or centralization and individualization, which manifest themselves in a steady monopolization of the means of violence and taxation, an interventionist human rights discourse, and war as a means of democratizing and pacifying the planet. Elias' 'historical social psychological' approach offers new (...) categories of analysis with which to both explain the effects of globalization and indicate how international interdependence fosters both control and resistance, both democratization and radicalization, and both integration and disintegration. (shrink)

Introduction -- "Mediating estrangement: a theory for diplomacy," review of International Studies (April, l987), 13, pp. 91-110 -- "Arms, hostages and the importance of shredding in earnest: reading the national security culture," Social Text (Spring, 1989), 22, pp. 79-91 -- "The (s)pace of international relations: simulation, surveillance and speed," International Studies Quarterly (September 1990), pp. 295-310 -- "Narco-terrorism at home and abroad," Radical America (December 1991), vol. 23, nos. 2-3, pp. 21-26 -- "The terrorist discourse: signs, states, and systems of (...) global political violence," World Security: Trends and Challenges at Century's End, ed. M. Klare and D. Thomas, St. Martin's Press (1991), pp. 237-265. -- "S/N: international theory, balkanisation, and the new world order," Millennium Journal for International Studies (Winter 1991), vol. 20, no. 3, pp. 485-506 -- "Cyberwar, videogames, and the Gulf War syndrome," Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed and War (Cambridge, Ma and Oxford, UK, 1992), pp. 173-202 -- "Act IV: fathers (and sons), mother courage (and her children), and the dog, the cave, and the beef," in Global Voices: Dialogues in International Relations, ed. James N. Rosenau (Boulder, Co and Oxford, Uk: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 83-96 -- "The value of security: Hobbes, Marx, Nietzsche and Baudrillard," in the Political Subject of Violence, ed. G.M. Dillon and David Campbell, Manchester University Press (1993), pp. 94-113 -- "The C.I.A., Hollywood, and sovereign conspiracies," Queen's Quarterly (Summer 1993), vol. 100, no. 2, pp. 329-347 -- "Great men, monumental history, and not-so-grand theory: a meta-review of Henry Kissinger's diplomacy," Forum review article, Mershon International Studies Review (april 1995), vol. 39, no. 1, pp. 173-180 -- "Post-theory: the eternal return of ethics in international relations," New Thinking in International Relations Theory, eds. Michael Doyle and John Ikenberry (New York: Westview Press, 1997), pp. 55-75 -- "Cyber-deterrence," Wired (September 1994), 2.09., p. 116 (plus 7 pages) -- "Global swarming, virtual security, and Bosnia," the Washington Quarterly (Summer 1996), vol. 19, n0. 3., pp. 45- 56 -- "The simulation triangle," 21c (issue 24, 1997), pp. 19-25 -- "Virtuous war and hollywood," the Nation (3 april 2000), pp. 41-44 -- "Virtuous war/virtual theory," International Affairs (fall, 2000), pp. 771-788 -- "Hedley Bull and the case for a post-classical approach," International Relations at LSE: a History of 75 Years (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 61-87. "the illusion of a grand strategy, op-ed," the New york Times, may 25, 2001 -- "In terrorem: before and after 9/11," Worlds in Collision, eds. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), pp. 101-116 -- "The question of information technology in international relations," Millennium Journal of International Studies (vol. 32, no. 3, 2003), pp. 441-456 -- "The illusion of a grand strategy," op-ed, the New York Times, may 25, 2001. (shrink)

Dialogue between eastern and western philosophies -- Dialogue between Confucianism and Christianity.

The increasing problem of bioinvasion (the mixing up of natural species characterising the planet's local ecosystems due to globalisation) is investigated as an example of an ecosemiotic problematic. One concern is the scarcity of scientific knowledge about long term ecological and evolutionary consequences of invading species. It is argued that a natural science conception of the ecology of bioinvasion should be supplemented with an ecosemiotic understanding of the significance of these problems in relation to human culture, the question of cultural (...) diversity, and what it means to be indigenous or foreign. Bioinvasion, extinction of native species, and overall decrease in biodiversity, may go along with decreased cultural diversity; as when the loss of local agricultural traditions lead to genetic erosion. There are possible ecosemiotic parallels between language extinction and species extinction, both being related to globalisation. It is argued that the case of bioinvasion reveals the existence of two kinds of ecosemiotic contingency, (1) evolutionary open-ended and partly random generation of new species and extinction of old ones; (2) the historicity of culture in general and `culture's nature' specifically in the demarcation of a set of landscapes characteristic to a particular nation and piece of human history. (shrink)

The processes of economic integration induced by globalization have brought about a certain type of legal practice that challenges the core values of legal ethics. Law firms seeking to represent the interests of internationally active corporate clients must embrace and systematically apply concepts of strategic management and planning and install corporate business structures to sustain competition for lucrative clients. These measures bear a high conflict potential with the core values of legal ethics. However, we observe in parallel a global consolidation (...) of these core values through an enhanced cooperation of national professional bodies, the use of international codes, and comparative legal ethics teaching and research. Furthermore, state regulation of the legal profession is concerned with preserving the core values of legal ethics to conserve the lawyer's role in upholding the rule of law. This article defends that legal ethics is adapting to the pressures exerted by "managerial" approaches to legal practice without this altering core values that underlie legal ethics. (shrink)

The original essays collected in this book offer a comprehensive evaluation of realism as a theory of international relations. Realism has been the subject of critical scrutiny for some time and this examination aims to identify and define its strengths and shortcomings. In the realist family there has been a flourishing of variants and interpretations, a fact that many critics of realism tend to obscure or dismiss. In the past decade and a half we have seen the emergence of neo-realism, (...) structural realism, security realism, and other readings. Now is a good time to reflect on the richness and diversity of the realist family of theories, compare the variants, examine the differences among them, explore what unites them, and elucidate the policy implications of each. This unique book makes an important contribution to the study of international relations. The essays collected within it offer an incisive analysis of the logic and history of theories in the realist family. They also demonstrate the value of scholarship that looks beyond fleeting intellectual fads to the enduring themes of life in a crowded and dangerous world. (shrink)

This book evaluates the claim that in order to explore the changing social foundations of global power relations today, we need to include in our analysis an understanding of global civil society, particularly if we also wish to raise ethical questions about the changing political and institutional practices of transnational governance. The authors engage directly with the notion of global civil society in order to examines the ethical, social, and political conditions that make certain kinds of globalizing practices a reality (...) today. They explore and utilize the normative dimensions of the civil discourse to further debate about the meaning of citizenship in a world of multi-level governance, as well as the changing characteristics of political community and democracy. Bridging the normative concerns of political theorists with the historical and institutional focus of scholars of international relations and international political economy, this book will be of broad interest to students and researchers concerned with international relations, civil society, global governance and ethics. (shrink)

Approaches to global ethics have drawn on a number of diverse theoretical traditions, such as Kantianism and utilitarianism. While emerging frameworks contribute to a growing awareness of and interest in ethics within a global society, the values that they prioritize are not adequate for realizing a just, equitable and fair system of global governance. This article considers the possibilities of an alternative ethic - a feminist ethic of care - and explores how it can bear on present circumstances, including global (...) inequity and injustice. This care ethic has been put forward as a viable normative approach to politics and policy. Little attention, however, has been paid to the potential of a care ethic within the globalization and ethics debate. This article illustrates how the values and corresponding principles of care, grounded in relationships and responsibilities, are essential to responding adequately to the current challenges of globalization. By examining the relevance of care in this context, the article seeks to broaden dominant ethical worldviews and contribute to the articulation of normative tools for examining globalization while at the same time avoiding the trappings of conventional universality - the abstract and a priori thinking typically associated with conceptions of global ethics. (shrink)

We have reached a rough moral consensus in the field of business ethics. We believe in capitalism with a safety net and enoughregulation to deal with serious market imperfections. We favor autonomy for individuals and democracy for governments, thoughnot necessarily for organizations. We recognize the rights of citizens and the different rights of employees. We respect a variety of possible sets of values, and so countenance a distinction between public and private. In other words, we are capitalists, pluralists, and liberals. (...) But globalization will force us and businesspeople who share our views to deal with significant stakeholders who do not. The 21st century will see the accelerating pace of globalization. The great challenge for business ethics, for its philosophers and its scholars of business, will be to identify and advocate morality that takes adequate account of globalization, and that in so doing avoidsuntenable parochialism without falling into relativism. (shrink)

In Finnegans Wake, the uncouth portmanteau word "Janglish" suggests a jangled kind of English. Joyce, of course, lived and died before that other uncouth word, "globalization," rode the waves of cyberspace. By resorting to a dubious conceit, I use "Janglican" to invoke American letters on the tongue of writers like Junot Diaz, Amy Tan, Aleksander Hemon, Ha Jin, Jhumpa Lahiri, Chang-rae Lee, among many others (including this writer, who speaks every language with an accent, a literary feat of sorts.)There's no (...) conceit in my subtitle, which moots the central question of this essay: can we still speak of national literatures—say, of American or Australian literature—in the age of globalization? (Concepts germane to .. (shrink)

What should environmentalists say about free trade? Many environmentalists object to free trade by appealing the “Race to the Bottom Argument.” This argument is inconclusive, but there are reasons to worry about unrestricted free trade’s environmental effects nonetheless; the rules of trade embodied in institutions such as the World Trade Organization may be unjustifiable. Programs to compensate for trade-related environmental damage, appropriate trade barriers, and consumer movements may be necessary and desirable. At least environmentalists should consider these alternatives to unrestricted (...) free trade if they do not prevent the achievement of other important moral objectives, can efficiently reduce environmental problems, and institutional safeguards can prevent their abuse. (shrink)

The personal and the political, the local and the global—divergent perspectives are synthesized in this visionary examination of globalization and how it affects individual lives. Personal stories of urban and rural living reveal the many varieties of experience and how Western culture has created both immense wealth and poverty. Discussions of primary production, neoclassical economics, and international trade agreements accompany writing about nature and how rural life is deeply connected to land.

The article discusses the Kenyan post-2007 elections political crisis within the framework of 'libertarian communitarianism' that integrates individualistic self-interest with traditional collectivist solidarity in the era of globalization in Africa. The author argues that behind the Kenyan post-election anarchy can be analyzed as a type of 'prisoner's dilemma' framework in which self-interested rationality is placed in a collectivist social contract setting. In Kenya, this has allowed political manipulation of ethnicity as well as bad governance, both of which have prevented the (...) building of a strong, impartial state. In Kenya, socio-economic disparities and historical injustices due to corruption, nepotism, cronyism and other forms of favoritism have maintained ethnic and other internal tensions, which exploded into open conflict after the disputed December 2007 elections. The author shows how the 'libertarian communitarist' politico-economic context lacks shared values and precludes forward-looking solutions for social justice that promote public good and national unity. Instead, a nation remains divided with its people set up in competitive positions, because there is public trust neither in partisan and self-interested governments nor in inefficient state structures with often (ethnically and/or regionally) biased (re)distribution of resources and unequal service delivery. The greed of the political elites and grievances of the ordinary citizenry maintain distrust across the nation and focus on past injustices rather than finding a shared agenda for future unity. The author suggests that in order to build up public trust, to strengthen the state structures and to gain national unity, it is necessary to focus on shared values and a forward-looking concept of justice, acceptable to all. (shrink)

The presentation and paper for this conference go to the heart of the relationship between globalization and poverty worldwide. Data from the United Nations reveal the dramatic increase in exports and imports from 1990 to 2004, along with the uneven economic performance/quality of life across development groupings and geographical regions. Thus, findings suggest the possibility that trade growth has failed expectations that developing countries would rise to greater levels of productivity and subsequendy reduce abject poverty. Nonetheless, the situation is far (...) from hopeless and real progress can occur with a continued movement by transnational corporations toward socially responsible human rights, proactive governmental strategies that support productive dynamism, and removal of public policies that unfairly restrict less developed nations. (shrink)

This essay explores several facets of current debates about globalization: especially the role of American national culture in defining the issue of international outreach; and the examination of specific dimensions of globalism—standardization of technology, rationalization of the international monetary system, evaluation and measurement of performance. Once issues are examined in empirical rather than ideological terms, it is clear that advantages accrue to those societies capable of product innovation and satisfaction of mass needs, rather than those that resort to threat, force (...) or coercion. The age of globalization, far from being an extension of the colonial and imperial systems that dominated most of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, signifies closure to the old political economy. The essay ends with a coda on globalization as the latest stage of an egalitarianism that places the modernization-developmental process at loggerheads with most varieties of totalitarian rule. (shrink)

Drawing on work in International Relations, International Law and Global Governance, this book aims to provide a clear and wide-ranging introduction to the ...

Globalization is being celebrated in many circles as a distinctive achievement of our age, drawing peoples and societies more closely together and creating far greater wealth than any previous generations ever knew. While the first of these assertions is correct in the sense that societies and cultures are colliding, hitherto relatively closed horizons are opening up, and spaces and time are compressing, the second deserves critical interrogations. Using Africa's experience with globalization as a case study, this article argues that globalization (...) be understood as an emerging preference for certain institutional and policy practices that are creating and coercively imposing pervasive but avoidable conditions of material deprivations on many societies. The article defends a motivational rationale anchored in the normative vision of socio-economic and development rights as a way to mitigate the deleterious effects of unguarded globalization. (shrink)

Contemporary processes of globalization havebeen accompanied by a serious deterioration inthe health of many women across the world. Particularly disturbing is the drastic declinein the health status of many women in theglobal South, as well as some women in theglobal North. This paper argues that thehealth vulnerability of women in the globalSouth is inseparable from their political andeconomic vulnerability. More specifically, itlinks the deteriorating health of many Southernwomen with the neo-liberal economic policiesthat characterize contemporary economicglobalization and argues that this structure (...) issustained by the heavy burden of debtrepayments imposed on many Southern countries. In conclusion, it argues that many Southerndebt obligations are not morally bindingbecause they are not democraticallylegitimate. (shrink)

At its core, the evolution of democratic civil society is a process of transcending existing, historical social space, a process that desires to dissolve "political society" into "civil society" and with it to reformulate space as more democratic, participatory public space, and global spheres of interaction. In this article, the author examines the implications of globalization and the evolution of democratic civil society. Drawing on the work of French theorists de Certeau and Lefebvre, the author examines the nature of space (...) as a social construct and the importance of understanding space as a practiced place in relation to the evolution of democratic civil society that makes transnational space a practiced place for global civil society. The author argues that as globalization spreads across nation-states, spatial forces produced by economic, cultural, and political discourses and practices give way to the potential for the evolution of democratic civil society. (shrink)