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Water Issues from a Global, National, and Local Perspective

September 19, 2011

untitled (Sila Dhamma ) / CC BY 3.0

By Nathaniel Uchtmann

Water is prominent on the list of global crises that are predicted to present major challenges to human populations at scales ranging from local to global. In the coming decades, water is thus expected to acquire an increasingly important position on the global agenda. Even today, water-related human morbidity and mortality, which results from widely divergent levels of both water quality and quantity, is already widespread, and almost 80% of the global population faces exposure to high threat levels of water insecurity (Vorosmarty et al 2010). The impacts of water shortages are particularly acute in the developing world, where rising populations and climate change are expected to cause severe water shortages for one-third of the population in this century (Lall 2008).

Yet, despite such findings, awareness of the global water crisis is far from commensurate with the scale of the problem. One reason, according to former UNDP Administrator Kemal Dervis, is that “the people suffering the most from the water and sanitation crisis—poor people in general and poor women in particular—often lack the political voice needed to assert their claims to water” (UNDP 2006, p. vi). Additionally, the mainstream academic community involved with hydrology and water has largely ignored the issue and holds widely divergent opinions regarding whether and when the world will run out of water (Lall 2008). But according to one analyst, broad agreement does exist that  “there will be significantly increasing water scarcity that will turn ‘water’ into a key, or the key, limiting factor in food production and livelihoods generation for poor people (…) virtually throughout rural Asia and most of Africa” (Rijsberman 2004, p. 8).

Our understanding of global water issues can be greatly increased by examining three sub-issues: safe drinking water; pollution and degradation; and water scarcity (Lall 2008).

“Safe” drinking water implies that water is largely free from impurities and microorganisms that frequently cause disease or death. Unsafe drinking water significantly limits human progress—close to half of all people in developing countries suffer from health problems caused by water and sanitation deficits at any given time (UNDP 2006). To address this burden, the WHO outlines corrective measures, such as providing access to sufficient quantities of safe water, providing facilities for disposal of sanitary waste, and introducing sound hygiene behaviors (WHO 2011b). The cascade of ensuing benefits from government investment in water and sanitation is so powerful that it can even be labeled as preventive medicine, with apt analogies drawn to immunizations (UNDP 2006).

Major sources of water pollution are usefully divided into “point sources” and “non-point sources”. Far greater progress has been made in reducing the detrimental consequences from point sources (a definite source of pollution, such as a pipe), at least where sufficient political will and funds are available. In contrast, pollution from non-point sources (diffuse sources , such as farms) has proven to be more difficult to control due to greater costs, and because the effects are easier to ignore—perniciously affecting downstream ecosystems and gradually accumulating in water bodies and food chains (Lall 2008).

Water scarcity “refers to a situation when the water supply is inadequate in relation to the water demand for basic human and ecological necessities, including the production of food and other economic goods”. Scarcity is the principal component of the three-fold water crisis because it can drive or exacerbate both access and pollution (Lall 2008). The Human Development Report highlights the social, rather than environmental, origins of water scarcity: “the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability” (UNDP 2006, p. 2).

The interdependence of water issues is reinforced by the following observation: “For the first time in human history, human use and pollution of freshwater have reached a level where water scarcity will potentially limit food production, ecosystem function, and urban supply in the decades to come” (Jury & Vaux 2007, p. 2). Studying water’s interconnected issues usefully illustrates the increasing global competition over scarce necessities with widely-variable distribution.

Global Framework and Recent Developments

In July 2010, the UN General Assembly declared that safe and clean drinking water and sanitation constitutes a human right essential to the enjoyment of life and all other human rights (WHO 2011a). Yet, “around 1.1 billion people globally do not have access to improved water supply sources” (WHO 2011b). Predictably, this failure leads to high rates of sickness and death among young children from preventable diseases, and arguably qualifies among the 20th century’s greatest development failures (Gleick 2004-5). Further, water’s role reaches far beyond measures of human health: clean water and sanitation rank among the most powerful drivers for human development by extending opportunity, enhancing dignity, and helping to create a virtuous cycle of improving health and rising wealth (UNDP 2006).

There has been progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goal  for safe drinking water—the world will meet or even exceed the drinking water target by 2015 (with an estimated 86% of populations in developing regions having access to improved sources of drinking water, compared to 71% in 1990) (UN 2010). Unfortunately, the target for basic sanitation is out of reach because the estimated number of people lacking access to improved sanitation (2.6 billion in 2008) is projected to rise to 2.7 billion by 2015 (UN 2010).

Local Challenges and Opportunities

Local examples can illuminate the challenges and opportunities surrounding complex global water issues. “In Africa, the world’s second-driest continent, the availability and access to water is more crucial to existence than it is almost anywhere else on Earth. Poverty is widespread and although it is rapidly urbanizing, the majority of its population is still rural-based and dependent on agriculture” (UNEP 2010, p. 13). In sub-Saharan Africa, 69% of the population has no proper sanitation facilities, and 40% has no reliable access to safe water (UNEP 2010).

Kenya, a sub-Saharan African nation with statistics that mirror the UNEP baseline, is one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. Unsurprisingly, water heavily impacts major sectors of Kenya’s economy, including tourism (World Bank 2004). “Kenyans use water for drinking, energy generation, livestock production, agriculture, tourism, industry, and many other livelihoods. Lack of adequate, good-quality water is therefore a significant obstacle to development” (World Resources Institute 2007, p. vii). Kenya experiences particularly high child morbidity and mortality due to exposure to unsafe water (World Resources Institute 2007), and water pollution significantly contributes to increased civil strife: “Both surface and groundwaters receive urban pollution from wastewaters and sewage and chemicals from agricultural runoff. As well, declining and degraded water supplies have led to conflicts among different users, such as between pastoralists and farmers, upstream and downstream users, humans and wildlife, among others” (UNEP 2010, p. 107).

Conclusion

Water access and water scarcity are effective symbols of the ubiquitous interconnections and interdependencies of the global society. Given that the bulk of global water resources are consumed by agriculture, water pollution and shortages are directly traceable to lifestyles in the “developed” world. “It is estimated that 30 percent of all water in global food today comes from a country other than the one in which the food is consumed. This fraction is anticipated to grow, meaning that global market forces will play a role in both the supply and demand for local water resources” (Lall 2008, p. 9). Fortunately, the water crisis is not inevitable and does not result from limited availability. Instead, its roots lie in both institutions and political choices: “[l]ike hunger, deprivation in access to water is a silent crisis experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the resources, the technology and the political power to end it…. Success in addressing [water and sanitation challenges] through a concerted national and international response would act as a catalyst for progress in public health, education and poverty reduction and as a source of economic dynamism” (UNDP 2006, pgs 1-2). Recognition of this reality will benefit the whole of humanity.

References
Gleick, P. H. “The Millennium Development Goals for water: Crucial objectives, inadequate commitments.”
Jury, W. A. & Vaux Jr., H. J. “The Emerging Global Water Crisis: Managing Scarcity and Conflict Between Water Users.” Advances in Agronomy. Vol. 95, 2007, pp. 1-76.
Lall, U. “Water in the 21st Century: Defining the elements of global crises and potential solutions.” Journal of International Affairs, Spring/Summer 2008, vol. 61, no. 2. pp. 1-17. http://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/files/jia/1-17_lall.pdf
Rijsberman, F.R. “Water Scarcity: Fact or fiction?” 2004. Proceedings of the 4th International

Crop Science Congress. www.cropscience.org.au/icsc2004/pdf/1994_rijsbermanf.pdf

UN Department of Public Information. Goal 7 Ensure Environmental Sustainability Fact Sheet. September 2010. http://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/pdf/MDG_FS_7_EN.pdf
UNEP. “Africa Water Atlas.”2010. http://na.unep.net/atlas/africaWater/downloads/africa_water_atlas.pdf
UNDP. 2006 Human Development Report. “Beyond scarcity: power, poverty and the global water crisis.” http://hdr.undp.org/en/media/HDR06-complete.pdf
Vorosmarty, C.J. McIntyre, M.O. Gessner, O. Dudgeon, D. Prusevich, A. Green, P. Glidden, S.

Bunn, S.E. Sullivan, C.A. Reidy Liermann, C. & Davies, P.M. “Global threats to human water security and river biodiversity.” September 30, 2010. Nature 467, pp. 555–561. http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v467/n7315/full/nature09440.html

World Bank. “Towards a Water-Secure Kenya: Water Resources Sector Memorandum.” April, 2004. http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/WDSContentServer/WDSP/IB/2004/04/23/-
000090341_20040423105557/Rendered/PDF/283980KE.pdf
World Health Organization. 2011. “Recent developments on the recognition of safe and clean water and sanitation as a human right.” http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/recognition_safe_clean_water/en/
World Health Organization. 2011. “Water Supply, sanitation and hygiene development.” http://www.who.int/water_sanitation_health/hygiene/en/
World Resources Institute. “Nature’s Benefits in Kenya: An Atlas of Ecosystems and Human Well-Being.” 2007. http://pdf.wri.org/kenya_atlas_fulltext_150.pdf

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Re-locating the U.S. Global Identity in the Post-9/11 World

June 18, 2010


Waleed Mahdi
Introduction

In “The local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” Stuart Hall identifies two forms of globes: “an older, corporate, enclosed, increasingly defensive one which has to go back to nationalism and national cultural identity in a highly defensive way, and to try to build barriers around it before it is eroded;” and a “global post-modern” one, “trying to live with, and…overcome, sublate, get hold of, and incorporate difference.” (i) The first globe, a product of modernity, created a globalization that thrived through the European/English colonial project, which wrestled with the question of nationalism in its attempt to infiltrate various geopolitical boundaries and gain access to other nation’s natural resources and cheap, if not free, labor; hence, adopting a homogenous approach that discards cultural variation and renders other nations into mini-English models. 

With the waning of the English/European power and the rising struggle of the ‘marginal’ for independence in the post-World War II, and by the time Soviet Union collapsed leading to the ascendancy of the United States to the global scale as the only supreme power, a new form of globalization has been adopted. Hall locates this globalization in a post-modern globe defined by a loosening process of the ‘nation-state’ and a subsequent weakening of the ‘national cultural identity’, augmented by an accelerated international interdependence. Ignited by the Fordist economics of mass production and consumption, and encouraged by an almost global embrace of the free market system, corporations (and often governments) have sought several ways to maximizing their profit, mainly through searching for cheap labor (relocating, outsourcing, franchising, etc.), and appealing for a global market. Faced with the challenging factor of cultural variation, the new form of globalization has accommodated the paradoxical mechanism of being ‘multi-national’ yet ‘decentralized’; capitalist institutions, consequently, would be less homogenous, and more adaptive to incorporating cultural differences.

As opposed to the English-model globalization, the American-model, according to Hall, “is not attempting to produce…little versions of Americanness,” but is rather seeking “to recognize and absorb those differences within the larger, overarching framework of what is essentially an American conception of the world.” Such a framework can be understood as a U.S. attempt to construct a global identity that markets pluralism as a commodity for both domestic and global consumption. Thus, the early association of globalization with Americanization, which has paradoxically generated both monetary revenues, e.g. Oprahfication, McDonaldization, and Disneyfication, and discursive formations of cultural and political anti-Americanism, would later be shaken as the U.S. embraced and marketed an American global identity. Meanwhile, the 1990’s witnessed a parallel domestic move to construct a global identity through celebrating the U.S. as a multicultural society, and presenting it as the micro-version of the multi-cultural globe. The twenty-first century U.S. identity, it had been speculated, was on its way be ‘global’.

9/11 & U.S. Global Identity
Two days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the editor of the French newspaper Le Monde, Jean-Marie Colombani, published an editorial titled Nous sommes tous Américains (We are all Americans). The title of his editorial for May 14, 2004 asks the question Tous non-Américains? (Are We All Un-American?). The dramatic transformation in Colombani’s editorials has become an iconic citation of the international community’s reaction to the post-9/11 change in the nature of the U.S. global identity. A heightened discourse of nationalism has hyped the terror invoked by the attacks to declare a state of emergency and prohibited criticism that may potentially undermine the nation. The U.S. has been strictly defined in terms of a timeful constructed national landscape that needed to, not only retaliate through waging a war in Afghanistan and in a preventive measure in Iraq – let alone holding suspects indefinitely without charging them and endorsing interrogation torture techniques in the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo facilities – but also alienate Arab/Muslim Americans from this landscape and subject them to racial profiling as a measure to fight ‘homegrown terrorism’. In her reflections on the post-9/11 U.S. state, Judith Butler stresses, “It was my sense in the fall of 2001 that the United States was missing an opportunity to redefine itself as part of a global community when, instead, it heightened nationalist discourse, extended surveillance mechanisms, suspended constitutional rights, and developed forms of explicit and implicit censorship.” (ii) All this has been packaged, as Dana Heller would put it, into a commodity named ‘9/11’ that the United States has managed to sell a re-branded vision of the nation, marketed domestically and globally through the good vs. bad and you are with us or with the terrorists paradigms. (iii)

The post-9/11 transition in the U.S. global identity – from an attempt to utilize its global superpower status as a means to transcend geopolitical boundaries in favor of reaching a global audience to a heightened discourse of bourgeois nationalism that positions the U.S. nation in a dangerous world; and from a celebration of multiculturalism as a part of an imagined American community to a racial exclusion of Arab/Muslim Americans – cannot be located within the second form of globalization that Hall identifies. It rather corresponds with a third form that overlaps the two globes, i.e. the modern and the post-modern. “The global post-modern,” Hall stresses, “is not a unitary regime because it is still in tension within itself with an older, embattled, more corporate, more unitary, more homogenous conception of its own identity.”

The United States current global role cannot, therefore, be simply conceived through a stark contrast with the English colonialist role; it can rather be understood to exhibit a paradoxical lens that depicts the U.S. as a culturally appropriating imperialist project. This paradox serves as a critical tool to understand the complexity of the U.S. post-9/11 global identity, which accounts for the contradiction in the well-reception and organized rejection of its economic, political, and cultural products. Colombani’s equivocal identification with and rejection of Americanness, for instance, resonates with a global embrace and rejection of the ‘9/11’ product. The global mediation of the images reflecting the collapse of the World Twin Towers, the rising number of innocent victims, the horror-stricken families, and the chaotic state of New York City has won the world’s consolidation with Americans and their values of freedom and democracy; yet the global mediation of images mirroring the ramifications of a unilateral nationalist sense of revenge, an emblemic of which has been the released photos of the inhumane torture of Iraqis in ‘Abu Ghraib’, has generated anger and depreciation of what the United States has come to represent.

Conclusion
The problematic contrasting of the two forms of globalization through an emphasis on a post-modern U.S. global identity and a modern English colonial identity is also conducive to theorizing for the triumph of the former and, subsequently, empties the U.S. global identity from its complexity, mostly defined along the interplay between the domestic and the global. In this regard, Hall raises a critical question: “Is globalization nothing but the triumph and closure of history by the West?” His suggestion not to “resolve the question too quickly” and his vision that this is not the ultimate triumph but rather another face of the triumph of the West can be regarded, not only as an early response to Francis Fukuyama’s vision charted in his 1989 essay “The End of History” which celebrates the Western Liberal democracy as the end of humanity’s socio-cultural evolution, but also as a critical observation of the dynamics of the post-modern globe that would fluctuate the U.S. global identity between an extension into universalism and a contraction to nationalism, or, as Hall aptly locates it, between the ‘global’ and the ‘local’.

____________________________
i. The article was first published in 1991.

ii. See Precarious Life: The Powers of Morning and Violence. Verso, London, 2004

iii. Read Dana Heller’s “Consuming 9/11,” in The Selling of 9/11: How a National Tragedy Became a Commodity, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005: 1-26.

Waleed Mahdi is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at  The University of Minnesota.

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Strong Governments Underpin Globalization

May 14, 2010

Howard H. Lentner

The “great recession” has brought to light some of the foundations that underpin globalization, in particular state institutions required for guaranteeing private contracts, regulating businesses, providing money that allows transactions to continue, and propping up systemic arrangements of the economy. In the conventional view of globalization these foundations have been obscured by those who believed that the market was trumping the state. A few writers had understood the critical nature of state power and had foreseen the possibility of such vigorous government action in an emergency as we have witnessed since September 2008. In this view globalization does not pit states against markets; instead, both are essential to the stability of economic processes across the world, but the state is the indispensable component. 

Since the early 1980s in the United States and earlier in Britain and even earlier in New Zealand, governments have adopted neoliberal policies designed to reduce government participation in the economy, weaken regulatory agencies, privatize former government activities, and place great faith in the ability of markets to regulate themselves. These policies and the ideology that underlay them remained in place despite the need for significant governmental intervention to prevent economic disaster in the savings and loan crisis of 1988, the Mexican economic crisis of 1994, and the East Asian economic crisis of 1997. With the onset of the great recession in December 2007 and the financial crisis that made its appearance in September 2008, governments across the world have intervened to prevent the collapse of financial systems, bailing out banks, buying firms, and injecting large amounts of money into their respective national economies in an attempt to halt the hemorrhaging of jobs and to resume growth. In this case, governments have, in a halting and piecemeal fashion, questioned the premise that markets are self-regulating and have been putting forth legislation to build a more effective regulatory regime.

In the United States the president and Congress are promoting consumer protection legislation in the face of substantial resistance by adherents of failed neoliberal ideology and the financial services industry. The takeover of portions of the banking, insurance, and auto industries by the government of the United States included provisions for limiting the compensation of the twenty-five top executives of such companies. Underway are plans to reform bank regulation, and proposals have been made for removing government endorsement of ratings agencies. However, intermingling of elites from government and the sectors to be regulated as well as the dependence of elected officials on the largesse in campaign contributions from the leaders of large economic units has led to the rejection of certain regulatory proposals and to resistance to a comprehensive analysis within the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission that might lead to coherent reform. For example, in its new protocols for listing derivative instruments on a public exchange, the Obama administration has provided a loophole for exceptions for private trades. Although it seemed unlikely that the barriers between commercial and investment banking that had been in place since the 1930s until their removal ten years ago would be reenacted, Paul Volcker’s appointment as an advisor in the White House improves the chances that barriers between commercial and investment banking may yet be erected. The administration has intervened within firms to limit the compensation of top executives and to restructure incentives, but almost no attention has been given to a preferable alternative, imposing marginal tax rates on high incomes of perhaps fifty percent on incomes of a million dollars or more up to ninety percent on those over five million dollars. Piecemeal and half-hearted reform will probably do little to change behavior, so that we can expect the same risky business practices that led to the great recession will continue. In time, then, another disorder will emerge that will require another massive intervention by the government. Because the regulatory system will have been tinkered with around the margins, the next crisis will be shaped differently in its particulars. Nevertheless the basic pattern of the government’s stepping in to save the system from the unregulated missteps, fraud, and deliberately risky calculations will ensue.

There is an alternative path to be taken. First, a sharp distinction needs to be drawn between the government, on the one side, and powerful private economic actors in society. The distinction, at base, is an intellectual one, but it can be put into practice only by the government’s assigning specific roles associated with setting rules and performing regulative tasks to itself and leaving business decisions within the constraints set to private firms. Just as the government needs to stay out of commercial decisions, it needs to keep private actors out of regulatory and legislative decisions; this can be done only by eliminating or at least minimizing private financing of election campaigns.

Second, in its regulatory capacity the government must draw sharp lines along several dimensions in the operations of the market. Among the most important is the restoration of the wall between commercial and financial investment banking as was embodied in the Glass-Steagall Act. Another border needs to be erected between the task of rating investments and consulting for the firms being rated. In regard to the ratings agencies, they need to be separated from governmental endorsement.

Third, the government needs to correct flaws in regulatory steps already taken. For example, all derivatives trades should be required to be done through a transparent exchange, so the exceptions for “private trades” needs to be eliminated from the plan put forward by the Obama administration.

Fourth, the government must enact clear, relatively simple rules that have to be followed by firms and other private institutions. For example, a rule that sets minimum leverage standards for broad categories of loans would institutionalize prudence in lending. For example, the government could set a minimum down payment for any housing purchase at twenty percent of the sales price, and it could require that each commercial bank retain cash deposits equivalent to ten percent of its loans and that each investment bank maintain a cash reserve of ten percent of its assets.

The fundamental shift required to advance globalization without the incalculable risks attending unregulated markets, especially in the financial sector, is to drop neoliberal ideology and recognize the essential functions that states perform, including the provision of security and stability in the international system and the effective oversight and enforcement of rules governing an economic system. Business cycles will remain an inherent characteristic of capitalist economies, but they need not embody system-threatening features such as firms that are regarded as “too big to fail,” and they can be smoothed out considerably by prudent and effective monitoring and regulation by competent governments.

References

John Cassidy 2009. How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Jeffrey Friedman 2009. “A Crisis of Politics, Not Economics: Complexity, Ignorance, and Policy Failure,” in Critical Review 21 (2–3): 127-183.

Howard H. Lentner 2004. Power and Politics in Globalization:  The Indispensable State. New York: Routledge.

Office of the Special Inspector General for the Troubled Asset Relief Program, Report to Congress, October 21, 2009.  http://www.sigtarp.gov/reports/congress/2009/October2009 _Quarterly_Report_to_Congress.pdf

Richard A. Posner 2009. “Financial Regulatory Reform: The Politics of Denial,” in The Economist’s Voice. http://www.bepress.com/ev, November.

Andrew Ross Sorkin 2009. Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System From Crisis — and Themselves. New York: Viking.

Howard H. Lentner is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science at the City University of New York

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Global studies abroad: toward a more integrated and meaningful study abroad experience

May 7, 2010

David Abernathy

Most undergraduate students majoring in global studies will spend some portion of their academic career studying abroad. Indeed, the “study abroad requirement” is seen as an essential component of the global studies degree at many institutions, as it provides students with an opportunity to immerse themselves in another culture and actively engage with the issues and problems they study in the classroom. But does simply including a study abroad component in a global studies major ensure that students will actually immerse and engage?  Given the subject matter of our nascent field, should we be expecting something more, or at least different, for our students when they study abroad? 

I found myself asking those questions as my institution undertook a significant overhaul of its global studies program. Considerable time was spent on the interdisciplinary curriculum, the number of credit hours, the arrangement of thematic tracks and regional concentrations, and the suite of courses that would sit at the core of the major. Study abroad, meanwhile, was barely discussed – it was simply a given. Our revised curriculum places much more emphasis on the processes and flows of globalization than before, incorporating but not privileging area studies at the level of the nation-state while addressing the increasing interconnectivity of society at all scales. We have adopted the metaphors of networks (Castells, 2000) and flows (Appadurai, 1996) as we seek to understand how globalization is changing our world. Yet our mentality toward study abroad programs seems to remain rooted in the paradigm of place. “I want to study in Ecuador,” is an example of the typical response given by a student when asked about the study abroad requirement. We may debate  the “end” or “demise” of the nation-state in our classrooms (Ohmae, 1996; Tanzi, 1998), but when it comes to study abroad the nation-state seems alive and well. Steiner asks of global studies in an earlier issue of this journal, “what is the unit of analysis?” (Steiner, 2007). We know the answer is not the nation-state (or at least not solely), yet too often that is the spatial construct we apply to our thinking on study abroad programs.

It seems appropriate and legitimate to argue that perhaps global studies students and those who teach and advise them should approach the study abroad requirement in a different manner. We should encourage students to focus on process and place together, rather than merely thinking about which international border they hope to cross. If our degree programs require students to pick a thematic track, as so often they do, then we should require our students to take the same approach to study abroad. If global studies is truly a different beast from area studies or international relations, then that difference should be reflected in the study abroad programs chosen by our students.

At my college, we are taking three steps to tailor our study abroad requirement to the specific needs of global studies students (while actively seeking input on other possible approaches). First, we are developing our own short-term study abroad courses that explicitly deal with key issues in contemporary globalization. Our first such course focuses on culture, globalization and development in Ghana, with students traveling in May 2010. Our second course examines the tensions between conservation and globalization in Panama, with study and travel planned for Spring 2011. The development of our own courses allows us to embed the learning objectives of our major directly into these study abroad opportunities.

Where internal study abroad courses are not appropriate or sufficient, we have begun working to improve our advising for external study abroad programs. We are developing a guide to study abroad programs that should be of particular interest and benefit to global studies students based on the subject matter and course of study. Study abroad institutions such as the School for International Training (SIT) and the Council on International Educational Exchange (CIEE) have developed courses that address complex global issues, and we are working to match courses like these to the academic tracks our students choose. We advise students to think about what themes and research topics they are most interested in grappling with while abroad, then look to see which courses provide the closest fit. We do not try to suggest that place is unimportant, of course – we simply want the topics and issues to be given significant weight in the decision-making process.

Finally, we are working to be more self-reflexive about the study abroad process itself, asking students to recognize that the networks and flows that position them as participants in programs across the globe can themselves be the object of study in our field. A colleague of mine once wrote about what students don’t learn abroad (Feinberg, 2002), arguing that it is near impossible for students from the Western world to escape the “imaginary world of globalized, postmodern capitalism” that puts them at the center of the globe, and asking if study abroad programs can provide a sufficient challenge to students’ preconceived notions of how the world works. His argument seems particularly germane for those of us in global studies: how can we justify a study abroad requirement if we don’t actively seek out – or create – those programs that offer such challenges, while in turn providing students with the necessary tools of critical analysis that enable them to question the very act of studying abroad?

We are working to truly integrate the study abroad requirement into our major, rather than simply treat it as a box that students must check on their way to a degree. By teaching students the necessary skills of critical analysis and asking them to apply those skills to their own study abroad experience, by advising students to focus on the themes and content of study abroad programs rather than simply locale, by identifying external study abroad programs that are particularly good fits for our major, and by developing our own internal study abroad courses that explicitly address globalization, we are increasing the likelihood that study abroad both embraces and enhances the learning objectives of our academic major.

Works Cited

Appadurai, Arjun. 1996. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Castells, Manuel. 2000. The Rise of the Network Society. New edn. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Feinberg, Benjamin. 2002. “What Students Don’t Learn Abroad.” The Chronicle of Higher Education (May 3).

Ohmae, Kenichi. 1996. The End of the Nation-State: The Rise of Regional Economies. New York: Free Press.

Steiner, Niklaus. 2007. Global Migration in Global Society. Global-e (May 17).

Tanzi, Vito. 1998. The Demise of the Nation-State? IMF Working Paper. Available at http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/wp/wp98120.pdf.

David Abernathy, PhD, is the chair of the Department of Global Studies at Warren Wilson College in Asheville, NC.

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Global Village/Another World: Globalization as a Contending Space

April 30, 2010

Dipankar Sinha

The ancillary contention of this essay, as distinct from the advocates of ‘quick-fix alternatives’, is that the search for the transformatory axes in politics cannot be realized by any ready-made ‘alternative’. The alternative can emerge only through painstaking nurturing of different and diffused non-dominant/ non-mainstream communication channels which question and contest the dominant order of things. Harold Lasswell(1948), though by no means a scholar of alternatives, had provided a classic formulation of political communication by advancing a set of apparently simple but extremely potent questions: “Who said what when and how?”. Keeping in mind that ‘alternative’ is a contested and somewhat slippery term, when we embark on the visualization of politics beyond the dominant- mainstream forms we can extend the Lasswellian formulation to pose the moot question: whose order is it any way?.

In the days of the inequitable globalization we increasingly hear the announcement of the “death of utopia” and the “end of history”, which emerges not only from the act of colonization of the political and economic institutions but also of the aesthetic and expressive faculties as well. The latter breeds “monoculture of the mind”. The Global Village project(Sinha 2010) not only effects material exclusion of the vast majority of people it also leads to symbolic exclusion which is effected through the denial of the “power of renaming”. The very idea of the Global Village is much hyped because it perfectly serves the interests of the globally dominant political forces to hide the tremendous disparities and discriminations. Who says that discriminations do not exist in village?

It necessarily follows that any meaningful and effective exploration of the possible and plausible alternatives to the fast-paced construction of the Global Village needs a simultaneous focus on the role of communication both as a facilitator of status quo and as a means of change. As a power-laden process of meaning generation and meaning circulation, through which the ‘reality’ is constantly produced, maintained, transferred and transformed, the process of communication, on the one hand, facilitates production and reinforcement of the dominant order; on the other hand, it also gives birth to and intensifies what we would prefer to call the zones of exclusion— both material and symbolic— of the dominant scenario to provide clues to possible routes of transformation.

In this backdrop the need of the hour is to be aware of the dangers of the ‘ritual’ communication— which enforces ‘voluntary’ submission to ‘appropriately’ patterned behaviour— by exploring ways and means to critique and subvert the high-pitched process of mainstreaming. But it has to be done by being in the mainstream and not by disengaging from the prevalent order or by engaging in a head-on-collision with it. Here we have in mind the “Delinking” thesis suggested by Samir Amin and the “Cultural Dissociation” thesis advocated by Cees Hamelink— both of which call for detachment as a deliberate strategy, respectively from the prevalent international economic order and international communication order. Their theses, so to say, are radical and tempting but impractical. If the successive protest movements against the current show of globalization raise the possibility of a “new dawn” in the struggle for alternatives they remain overwhelmingly struggles not only by communication but in communication vis-à-vis the prevalent world order. If communication is the infrastructural backbone of the discriminatory mainstream politics it would also be the same for progressing towards visualization of any viable alternative global order as well. The fundamental distinction between the two cases would be that in the mainstream form— as illustrated by the idea of Global Village— a singular kind of communication ‘order’ is being promoted, but the search for alternative politics should rely on diverse orders(Boyd Barrett, 2002) beyond the hegemony of one.

Then again, the task ahead is not easy. As hinted, the issue of alternative is not a simple one and any attempt to address it should avoid simplistic generalizations that often plague the ‘alternative euphoria’. At the core of this issue lies the question of alterity of alternatives. In most studies on alternative modes the alterity question is not addressed adequately, if at all, with the result that in these studies there is some kind of taken-for-grantedness about the specific kind of alternative being advocated. The fate of the erstwhile socialist states has revealed that the construction of an ‘alternative’ order without sufficient alterity is bound to end up in failure. If alterity connotes difference from particular others, did the alternatives that are being regarded as so, have sufficient alterity in the sense of having completely different constitutive rationale and order? Or are they basically trying to advocate a supposedly alternative order at a superficial level to gain some space in the prevalent order? These questions must be addressed in order to construct the imaginary of Another World and to transform it into reality.

References:

Boyd Barrett, Oliver (2002)  “Global Communication Orders” in William N. Gudykunst and Bella Mody eds., Handbook of International and Intercultural Communication, Thousand Oaks: sage Publications, pp.325-42.

Lasswell, Harold (1948)  “The Structure and Function of Communication in Society” in L. Bryson ed., The Communication of Ideas, New York: Institute for Religious and Social Studies.

Sinha, Dipankar (2010) “Communication: The Challenges of Globalization, Information Society, Identity and Development” in Yogendra Singh ed., Social Sciences: Communication, Anthropology and Sociology, Delhi: Pearson Longman/Centre for Studies in Civilizations, pp. 231-247.

Dipankar Sinha is a Professor of Political Science at Calcutta University as well as the Hony. Professor at the Institute of Development Studies in Kolkata.

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Visual Culture and Pedagogy: Teaching Human Rights with Film and Images

November 11, 2009

Safia Swimelar, Elon University

iStock_000004108690XSmall

Fence

Contemporary globalization takes place visually – whether it be images and videos transmitted by cell phone and webcams, public video surveillance in buses or on street corners, a protestor or journalist’s capturing of political violence then seen by millions, or the plethora of international films that document diverse global experiences.  Images have a democratic quality to them: regardless of one’s language, level of literacy, or nationality, looking at a photo of Iraqi prisoners assembled naked into a pyramid with American soldiers grinning behind them or a video of Iranian student Neda killed by security forces in the streets of Tehran gives one evidence and perspective on state policy, human rights, and the universality of suffering.  As Murray Edelman chronicles nicely in his From Art to Politics, our perceptions of current political events stem from the images and stories that our memory recalls from art – films, books, paintings, but also the recreated events on TV.

Given the power of images to create meaning and expose and hide multiple realities, they can be important pedagogical tools for teaching global studies and human rights; although, there are both advantages and disadvantages to its use.  Film can be used to enrich the classroom in relation to substantive content and student engagement and also in terms of what perceptions and assumptions about global issues images construct for us.

Diverse and foreign films provide students with a powerful, visual global perspective.  While this may sound obvious, film’s comparative advantage of powerful images, compelling and concrete dramatic stories, and close-up shots of conflict (that are rarely directly observed or felt) means that students can be temporarily immersed into another cultural and political milieu. This can provide a jumping off point for the academic lesson, as I discuss below.  In my experience, students are eager to see how issues look from different cultural perspectives.  For example, many students naturally think of the American case when we talk of racism and discrimination.  Showing a film with detailed stories and images of discrimination and violence against European immigrants and Roma-Gypsies or indigenous peoples in Central America can provide a needed comparative and global perspective and take the conversation to another critical level.   It enables the idea of human rights to be universalized and individualized, thus bringing the global and local together.

Film can also inform, educate, and engage students about human rights.  Not only is film crucial for representing, identifying, and providing evidence for human rights challenges, it is useful to illustrate case studies of broader concepts and importantly as catalysts for engagement and academic study.  For example, when I teach human rights foreign policy and genocide, the feature film on the Rwandan genocide Sometimes in April (dir. Raoul Peck, 2006) is a potent visual text that spurs students to ask questions about how states and international organizations grapple with the legal, political, and moral dilemmas of mass violence and genocide in general and in Rwanda in particular.  It is especially powerful because through the personal story of a mixed Hutu/Tutsi family and a Hutu extremist brother on trial, we see the Rwandan genocide personalized and individualized.  At the same time human rights are universalized – we see that mass violence and the struggle for security are common and global phenomena. Lastly, almost all aspects of the Rwandan genocide that can spin-off into class examination are represented in the film: the causes of genocide, its preparation and process, identity politics, role of U.S. and the United Nations, international war crimes trials, reconciliation, and the local gacaca trials.

Moreover, one of the ways of using film and photography in the classroom is to examine the assumptions we gain from those images.  For instance, students’ common stereotypes about conflict and poverty in Africa are reinforced through film and media images of starving African children, for example.  By contrast, Sometimes in April’s portrayal of a conventional middle-class Rwandan family does well somewhat not to fall back on these common assumptions.  This type of analysis can lead to an examination of how images can create or minimize the potential for international action, such as the importance of images of starving Bosnian concentration camp prisoners (that resembled Holocaust images) and spurred awareness and eventual NATO intervention.

Another example more dramatic and less political in its purpose, but that also illustrates the catalyzing power of film is Lilya-4-Ever (dir: Moodysson, 2002), a gripping, morose, cinematographically rich tale of child abuse and transnational trafficking that on its own does not tell us much about the broader causes, effects, and local/global efforts to ameliorate human trafficking.  It focuses intensely on Lilya’s post-Soviet life.  (Interesting, the U.S. State Department screened this film in connection with a discussion about policy on sex trafficking.)  In my experience, students gain an exceptional (yet tough-to-watch) visual representation of what a specific case of trafficking may look like today; it is also hard for students not to empathize with Lilya as she is abused and humiliated and thus be drawn into the issue and seek to learn deeper. While the use of emotion in film may be seen by some educators as a distraction, inappropriate, or too subjective, I believe that the dramatic nature of film can increase student’s interest and commitment to the subject; moreover, it can illustrate how the effects of abuse and hindrances to protection stem from psychological, personal, and socio-cultural issues, not only political and economic issues.  In learning, the categories “cognitive” and “emotional” are not distinct, but are aspects of one another.

In review, film can contribute to the goals of the human rights classroom by providing evidence and also by powerfully illustrating: (1) what abuse looks and feels like; (2) how individuals are affected by human rights struggles, including the short and long-term consequences of violations; (3) the different forms of human rights abuses and campaigns and how they are perceived cross-culturally; (4) the causes and processes, agents and actors; and (5) the explanations for action or inaction by outsiders.  Film is versatile as a form of art; it has the power to challenge conventional views, to call for social action and change, but also to reinforce entrenched assumptions.  All of these traits possess teaching moments.

This brings us to a brief overview of some of the disadvantages and concerns when using film in the global studies / human rights classroom. While emotion and personal drama can galvanize interest, there is also the potential for films with human rights content to be shallow, exploitative, and visually gratuitous in an attempt to use emotion manipulatively, thus we must be selective.  Secondly, art creates order out of disorder; it presents the ambiguous as coherent.  While this may be helpful to students, there is a risk of over-simplification, de-politicization, and de-contexualization of the problem.  Other potential disadvantages to the use of or over-reliance on film might be: (1) over time, the proliferation of negative images may become banal, unreal, and promote apathy, as Susan Sontag cautions; (2) the post-modern critique and the myth of the image: the belief that pictures can tell the whole story, while in fact they may conceal a great deal; (3) Shocking and violent images may overwhelm students.  Here, I suggest being both understanding to those students who have trouble with violent images, but also to be clear that being shocked, saddened, and uncomfortable may be part of the learning process, particularly on the subject of genocide.

In short, and despite the potential disadvantages noted above, I have found that using film and photographic images (for example, the Face of Human Rights book edited by Lars Müller) brings stories and images from the far corners of the world directly and vividly into the human rights and international studies classroom.  It can be a catalyst to engage students in critical thinking and deeper analysis .  Furthermore, while space limits further explanation, a study of images within global studies gets us to think about how our perceptions and assumptions about the world are affected by the inundation of images that surround us.

Brief List of Recommended Human Rights Films

  • Night and Fog
  • Sometimes in April
  • Ghosts of Rwanda
  • Grbavica: Land of My Dreams
  • Lilya-4-ever
  • The Lives of Others
  • Standard Operating Procedure
  • Taxi to the Dark Side
  • The Prisoner: how I planned to kill Tony Blair
  • Dead Man Walking
  • Battle of Algiers
  • Well-Founded Fear
  • Srebrenica: Triumph of Evil
  • Long Night’s Journey into Day
  • Bamako
  • Darwin’s Nightmare
  • Romero
Safia Swimelar, Ph.D. is an assistant professor of political science at Elon University in North Carolina where she teaches courses in human rights, international studies, and comparative politics. She is a Fulbright Scholar (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and recently published an article in the International Journal of Human Rights on human rights change and the Roma-Gypsies. She is currently working on a collaborative year-long project involving her students and courses examining the use of film, images and art in the teaching international studies and human rights.  She also studies human rights and politics in the contemporary Balkans.

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Rethinking Gender and Human Rights in the Global Political Economy

September 9, 2009

Deborah M. Weissman

Rosie the Riveter

Rosie the Riveter

Globalization has required a change in our way of considering and teaching human rights, gender and justice. Gender equality had hardly begun at the national level when transnational developments called attention to the need to think about the condition of women on a global scale. The relationship between human rights and women’s equality has indeed assumed a place of prominence in the debates on globalization and international law, including universal human norms to guide the conduct of public life as well as private realms.[1]

Women’s organizations and human rights groups have frequently relied upon legal approaches and rights-based claims. Violence against women is now considered a proper subject for international human rights law.  Indeed, the issue of human rights for women has moved to center stage of the United Nations in terms of programmatic, administrative, and methodological approaches to international relations.  So too has the International Criminal Court included both substantive protections, procedural safeguards, and administrative structures that are gender-sensitive and designed to fully incorporate the needs of victims of and witnesses to gender-based crimes.

But it is more complicated, for this process is itself often a microcosm of the larger debate about globalization, specifically the degree to which old paradigms of colonialism are being recreated in the guise of global integration.  The call for women’s equality, a summons to which all people of good will cannot but be sympathetic, must, nevertheless be received warily, to be examined for hidden agendas and ulterior motives.  Transnational feminist human rights advocacy cannot yet be unhinged from nation, where one nation, the United States, so dominates global dynamics.  Caution is warranted if the pursuit of objectives that envision women’s human rights is not as an end unto itself but a means by which to enhance U.S. global interests.  To this end, this essay proposes the need for including a critical perspective in classroom debates and academic endeavors about the gendered imperative of human rights.

Certainly, advocacy efforts to develop gendered international legal standards, most often framed as human rights protections function positively in a number of ways.  As a rhetorical matter, the appeal to globalized legal standards, particularly in the area of human rights, serves as a harbinger of change and messenger of modernity and progress.  In these circumstances, rules regarding the treatment of women have, at the very least, symbolic value.  But they may likely provide benefits beyond mere signaling for instrumental purposes.  For example, in countries that ratify human rights treaties such as the Convention to End Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), albeit without intentions to comply, CEDAW may still serve as a signpost of the government’s obligations about which women’s rights activists can make claims and raise issues both in domestic and international fora (Hathaway 2003).

Furthermore, by reframing the issue of women’s inequality as a global issue, it may be easier for activists to raise concerns that might otherwise be relegated to the background, or perhaps even abandoned, if such issues were to be articulated as a problem arising within the modern territorial state.  For example, during times of political turmoil that threaten the stability of state regimes, when governments experience pressure, particularly in the form of external hostility, women may be reluctant to mount criticisms that target state practices.  However, when these issues are expressed as global concerns, the tension between the need to critique internal state practices and the need to defend against external threats may be lessened.

While there is little doubt that women have benefitted by using the international human rights framework to seek and obtain equality and justice, it is also true that the efforts to harness such norms on behalf of women’s equality often acts in tandem with a different set of concerns and may serve as intellectual currency to advance U.S. political interests, defined in terms of power, and its ideological purpose of global economic liberalization.

The United States has invoked the circumstances of women as a pretext for humanitarian intervention, often with devastating consequences.  During the period of the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, advocates of U.S. expansionism justified military intervention in the Pacific and the Caribbean by appealing to the need to save, uplift, and civilize the women of the region (Hoganson 1998; Renda 2001; Merry 2000).  Intervention and occupation, it was claimed, would be the means by which to deliver the goods of human rights, particularly in the form of the rule of law.  Despite the inflammatory rhetoric used to describe the condition of women in order to promote intervention in the Caribbean and Pacific, these new legal measures were not designed to improve the circumstances for women.  Cuban women found themselves restricted in family arrangements and ownership and control of property (Stoner 1991; Ibarra 1998).  Once under U.S. influence, the doctrine of coverture was introduced in Hawai’i, effectively eliminating once powerful and active women from political participation (Merry 1998).  For many women, humanitarian intervention was experienced as rape and sexual harassment.

Concern for human rights continues today to function as a master narrative of U.S. imperial tendencies.  As historian Emily Rosenberg notes, at the end of the twentieth century, public commentators and scholars promoted America’s Empire as capable of delivering a host of public goods including freedom and democracy and the uplift of women (Rosenberg 2006).  The same missionary discourse that originated with saving women in the nineteenth century continues to play out in stereotyping and ongoing concerns about veils, polygamy, and women’s seclusion despite Arab feminist resistance to such formulaic depictions (Saunders 2002; Abu-Lughod 2002).  The current use of the condition of women in Afghanistan as an illustration of the need for intervention is thus, not without historical antecedents, presented in its current form as a product of a historical trend.

Moreover, human rights have been largely defined as individual political rights.  Rights pertaining to economic and social justice have been relegated to lesser considerations.  Others have described human rights initiatives targeted at women’s equality as a form of instrumental feminism that supports women’s rights as a means to enhance the development of market economies (Bessis 2004, Orford 2000).  Women are the new component of the globalized work force moving across international borders.  Gender inequality in the form of obstacles that prevent their free movement by which they enter the low-paid workforce are inimical to the interests of transnational corporations that rely on cheap female labor.

The current focus on human rights related to violence against women assumes, paradigmatically, the duty of the state to enforce standards and indeed, the obligation to punish offenders.  In a review of one study of one hundred eighty-five CEDAW reports, the most frequently noted human rights reform pertaining to gender equality was the enhancement of criminal penalties (Goldscheid, 2006).  Many of these reforms were modeled after legal developments in the United States, although such criminal intervention models may poorly serve women for a number of reasons.  State interference in the private realms of family or within local communities where gender-based human rights violations may occur is problematic in many settings, particularly where the state often poses as great a threat to human rights as do individual or local violators.  Criminal justice remedies may have little transference value in cultures where punishment for purposes of deterrence or retribution is not the norm.  Moreover, invoking state enforcement mechanisms in circumstances where economic and social justice issues are background considerations not only reduces the opportunity to eliminate human suffering, but may encourage the arbitrary exercise of power.

The benefits of the human rights discourse on behalf of global equality for women cannot be denied.  However, it is not a straightforward endeavor.  Put differently, to what extent must we question with our students and in our research whether the historical misuse of human rights create the very problems that the interveners claim they are seeking to interrupt?

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila, Do Muslim Women Really Need Saving? Anthropological Reflections on Cultural Relativism and Its Others, 104 Am. Anthropologist 783 (2002)

Bessis, Sophie, International Organizations and Gender: New Paradigms and Old Habits, 29 Signs 633 (2004)

Goldscheid, Julie, Domestic and Sexual Violence as Sex Discrimination: Comparing American and International Approaches, 28 T. Jefferson L. Rev. 355(2006)

Hathaway, Oona, Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference? 111 Yale L. J. 1935 (2003)

Hoganson, Kristin L., Fighting for American Manhood (1998)

Ibarra, Jorge, Prologue to Revolution (1998)

Merry Sally Engle, Law, Culture and Cultural Appropriation, 10 Yale J. L. and Human. 575(1998)

Merry Sally Engle, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000)

Orford, Anne, The Subject of Globalization: Economics, Identity and Human Rights, 94 Am. Soc’y Int’l L. Proc. 146(2000)

Renda, Mary A. Taking Haiti (2001)

Rosenberg, Emily S. Bursting America’s Imperial Bubble, 53 Chronicle of Higher Education 63 (Nov 13, 2006)

Saunders, Kriemhild, Introduction in Feminist Post-Development Thought, (Kriemhild Saunders, ed. 2002)

Stoner, K. Lynn, From the House to the Streets (1991)

[1] This entry is abstracted from Deborah M. Weissman, Gender and Human Rights: Between Morals and Politics in Gender Equality: Dimensions of Women’s Equal Citizenship (Linda C. McClain & Joanna L. Grossman, eds. 2009).

Deborah Weissman is the Reef Ivey II Distinguished Professor of Law and Director of Clinical Programs at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

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What 20th-Century Theorists Have to Say about Our World Today

August 11, 2009

Amy Stambach

cartoon

One day, way back in the 20th century, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes sat under an equatorial tree, living in their own imagined primitive past, discussing Global Studies. “What,” asked Barthes, “might the four of us contribute to a field that analyzes the world as a global system, stitched together—as Michael Curtin deftly puts it—by trade protocols, governance covenants, and communications networks?” Lévi-Strauss checked his notes, Lacan thought introspectively, and Foucault answered complicatedly. Each spoke of the cultural schemes that inform public policy and that structure debate about contemporary life. Let me summarize their conversation—translated from French.[1]

On public issues of human rights, health, trade and transit, and environment—key foci of Global Studies—all agreed (though Lacan sat quietly) that global market integration between 1880 and 1914 and again beginning in the late 1970s drove a convergence of cultural practices that intensified human connectivity. In other words, this quartet concurred with what Suzanne Berger would later argue (2003): that 21st-century globalization had historical precedent, and that contrary to the classical idea of law as the rule of reason over human action, global norm-making is shaped by a few key ideas—including liberal-democratic ideas about resource distribution, social justice, equity, and popular sovereignty, which are themselves at the core of a few liberal democracies, including but not limited to the US, UK, France, and Germany.[2]

This recognition that global treaties and policies articulate particular norms and values led Lévi-Strauss to reflect on the wisdom of using information-technology to advance universal structures of humanity. For he recognized that although the above-named countries dominated 20th-century politics, he also foresaw that BRICs nations increasingly would collaborate.[3] “We can easily conceive of a time when there will be only one culture and one civilization,” he postulated. But he added quickly that while this is possible, this would also be a shame: “What threatens us right now is probably what we may call over-communication—the tendency to know exactly in one point of the world what is going on in all other parts.” He muttered something about global-e’s illusion that there is in fact a global electronic world out there, but he turned this into a positive (if self-descriptive and paradoxical) point: that to innovate and produce, to be truly creative, people must “be convinced of their originality and even, to some extent, of their superiority.” He did not slam electronic media but he recognized—proudly, with neither bravado nor need for apology—his own national identity.

Foucault jumped in with a qualifying thought about power, knowledge, and the media—not that the world’s wealthy nations had a responsibility to distribute resources equitably (this argument was to be popularized by Jeffery Sachs twenty-eight years after Foucault’s death; and with Sachs, Foucault would in part wisely agree). Instead, Foucault argued that information-technology produced social connections around the globe, like a thread that discretely “connects points and intersects with its own skein.” Foucault borrowed back an idea later taken by cultural geographers (Held 2005, Hetherington 1997): that “our epoch is one in which space takes for us the form of relations among sites.” He wrote and spoke about national archives and cinema but foresaw that new media would become a 21st-century heterotopia: a “simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” and a “counter-site” that is outside of all places, like “a mirror”—a “placeless” place that makes other spaces look “absolutely real.”[4] More sociological than geographic, more conceptual than localizable, new media juxtapose “several sites that are themselves incompatible.” He added that Global Studies might be more up front in admitting the power-knowledge dynamics of this media and in seeing the Internet as a form of governmentality—that is, as a double-edged tool for constraining and monitoring as well as for enabling social movements. Looking forward, he agreed with a student in UW-Madison Global Studies’ capstone graduate course—a former regional representative of Coca-Cola from a BRICs country who said that Twitter and Facebook facilitate surveillance and stalking; she wanted none of it.

At the mention of Coca-Cola, Barthes came to life; he had a lot to say about branding and trade protocols. After all, he had written about “Wine and Milk,” “Steak and Chips” and “Ornamental Cookery” and about “the bourgeoisie as a joint-stock exchange.” He began with an observation: that not only is today’s wine not as good as in the past but today’s world is a parody of liberalism—a point later so-articulated by Achille Mbembe (2000) and Jean and John Comaroff (2007). Instead of regulating trade and distributing wealth, nation-states sell off public services and go semi-private, he observed. The politically powerful make their own wealth appear a reflection of having access to resources by virtue of their nation-states’ geology and geography instead of recognizing that they have inherited their privilege historically. This privatization and naturalization of common wealth blurs the distinction, Barthes said, between legality and illegality; it gives rise to branding, which in turn invites cloning and fuels a shadow economy that renders state sovereignty unsteady. Put simply, law is like myth in Barthes’ scenario. It “transforms the products of history into essential types.”

Analyzing this complexity of meaning and legality brings methodological challenges for Global Studies, all four agreed. The problem, they said, is to discern how public policy and lawlessness, grassroots understandings and global governance, inter-relate; to address and include but not reproduce International Relations models that examine dominant organizations’ procedural logic; and to teach about the world as a global system through an interdisciplinary lens that “married” (Lévi-Strauss’ term) critical analysis with prescriptive models.

They had lots of ideas, first and foremost that nation-state governments return to the business of exercising the will of popular sovereignty. Global economic and environmental crises, they said, demanded a new historic compromise between capital and democracy. Whereas historically, liberal democracies had protected and regulated private wealth, governments needed to share investments and support social movements as a force for human security. Funding streams needed to finance basic research, to demonstrate commitment to public policies, and to harness the political good will of the populace in the interest of using research to inform education. In exchange, all four agreed, free enterprise was not all bad; indeed they had benefited from its history. This self-realization enacted Barthes’ point that power “constantly dresses up a reality.” Like global prospectors—financiers who had commandeered “third-world” wealth in the 20th century—these four too, they admitted, had exploited the primitive, in their case for their own intellectual capital in the academy.

Replacing grass-skirts with khakis and collared shirts of a professoriate, these seminarians returned to Jeffrey Sachs’ Millennium Research Village,[5] where they struggled mightily with colleagues from the global north and south to keep their ideas clear and pragmatic for a new 21st century.

References

Barthes, Roland. 1989. Mythologies. NY: Noonday.

Berger, Suzanne. 2003. Notre Première Mondialisation: Leçons d’Une Échec Oublié. Paris: Seuil. English version http://web.mit.edu/polisci/research/berger/lessons-latest_English_version.pdf

Comaroff, Jean and John L. Comaroff. 2007. Law and Disorder in the Postcolony. Social Anthropology 15(2):133-152.

Foucault, Michel. 1986. Of Other Spaces. Diacritics 16(1):22-27.

Halliday, Terence and Bruce Carruthers. 2007. The Recursivity of Law: Global Norm-making and National Lawmaking in the Globalization of Corporate Insolvency Regimes. American Journal of Sociology 112(4):1135-1202.

Held, David. 2005. National Culture, the Globalization of Communication, and the Bounded Political Community. Planetary Politics, ed. E. Bronner. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Hetherington, Kevin. 1997. The Badlands of Modernity: Heterotopia and Social Ordering. London: Routledge.

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1979. Myth and Meaning. NY: Schocken.

Mbembe, Achille. 2000. At the Edge of the World: Boundaries, Territoriality, and Sovereignty in Africa. Public Culture 12(1):259-284.

Roudinesco, Elisabeth. 2003. The Mirror Stage: An Obliterated Archive. The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Sachs, Jeffrey D. 2008. Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet. NY: Penguin.

[1] Except in this first paragraph, text placed in double quotes is taken directly from these writers’ works.

[2] Halliday and Carruthers’ (2007) discussion of global norm-making is one of the most insightful I have seen.

[3] Brazil, Russia, India, and China—countries whose economies grew in the 1990s and whose governments increasingly work together.

[4] Foucault failed to reference Lacan on this point about mirrors, which is perhaps why Lacan looked away, indignantly. Lacan’s idea that individuals move through a stage of development in which they see themselves (as though in “a mirror”) in relation to a designated “cultural other” was informed by Lévi-Strauss’ idea that universal structures undergird human realities but was never taken up by Foucault or Barthes.  For Lacan—the least historically prescient of the four—the radical Other was Europe’s grass-skirted primitive. See Roudinesco 2003.

[5] Sachs 2008:238-241.

Amy Stambach is the Director of Global Studies and Professor of Educational Policy Studies and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison

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The Rise of the Global Imaginary and the Persistence of Ideology

July 30, 2009

Manfred B. Steger

steger

Political ideologies emerged at a crucial historical juncture—the great American and French revolutions of the eighteenth century—as authoritative systems of meaning consciously competing with religious doctrines. Taking a more this-worldly perspective on the origin and purpose of human communities, ideologies nonetheless resemble religion in their attempts to link the various ethical, cultural, and political dimensions of society into fairly a comprehensive shared mental models. Imitating religions’ penchant to trade in truth and certainty, political belief systems rely heavily on stories that persuade, praise, condemn, cajole, convince, and separate the ‘good’ from the ‘bad’. Like narratives of the sacred, ideologies both generate and thrive on human emotions. Certain political belief systems have inspired mass murder, torture, and rape much in the same way as some religious doctrines have fueled the flames of human suffering throughout the centuries. In fact, nearly all of the major political crimes committed in the last two centuries have been justified on the basis of some ‘ism’. But although ideologies serve such deceptive and manipulative purposes, they also represent ideas and claims that express the noble aspirations of particular sections of society at a given time in history.

The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 enticed scores of Western commentators to relegate ‘ideology’ to the dustbin of history. Proclaiming a radically new era in human history, they argued that ideology had ended with the final triumph of liberal capitalism. But this dream of a universal set of political ideas ruling the world came crashing down with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Since then, Western political leaders as different as George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Nikolas Sarkozy have argued that the contest with jihadist Islamism represents much more than the military conflict: as they put it, it is the ‘decisive ideological struggle of our time.’ In short, far from being moribund, competing political belief systems are live and well in the twenty-first century. But which ideologies? Liberalism? Conservatism? Socialism?

This is where the confusion starts. Although we know that ideology has not ended, we still grope for words to name what’s actually new. So what have we come up with so far? Neoliberalism. Neoconservatism. NeoMarxism. Neofascism. Postmodernism. Postindustrialism. Postcolonialism. And the list goes on. But does this proliferation of prefixes really help us to understand the novelty of our shifting ideological landscape? Are today’s isms merely updated versions of our familiar ideologies? Or have we moved into genuinely new territory?

Let me suggest that there is, indeed, something genuinely new about today’s isms. These shared mental maps that help us navigate our political universe no longer correspond neatly to our familiar mental and geographical spaces built over two centuries on the foundation of sovereign and self-contained nation-state. Instead, ideologies have begun to translate into political programs and agendas of what I call the ‘global imaginary’. What I mean is a shared sense of a thickening world community, bound together by processes of globalization that are daily shrinking our planet. The rising global imaginary finds its articulation not only in the ideological claims of political leaders and business elites who reside in privileged spaces around the world. It also fuels the hopes, disappointments, and demands of migrants who traverse national boundaries in search of their piece of the global promise. In fact, the global imaginary is nobody’s exclusive property. It inhabits class, race, and gender, but belongs to neither. It is an impressive testimony to the messy superimposition of the global village on the conventional nation-state.

Consider, for example, today’s asymmetric wars that pit alliances of nation-states and non-state actors against amorphous transnational terrorist networks that nonetheless operate in specific localities-usually in ‘global cities’ like New York, London, Madrid, or Jakarta. New global pandemics expose the limits of our national public health systems. Nationally framed environmental policies cannot respond adequately to accelerating global climate change. Conventional education and immigration schemes based on national goals and priorities are incapable of preparing shifting populations for the pressing tasks of global citizenship. Cultivating global fan clubs of millions of members, European football teams like Manchester United have long escaped the confines of nation-based geography. And the list goes on.

Indeed, well-intentioned attempts to ‘update’ modern political belief systems by adorning them with prefixes resemble futile efforts to make sense of digital word processing by drawing on the mechanics of moveable print. Since liberalism, conservatism, and socialism have been transformed beyond recognition by the forces of globalization, it is imperative that we get to know the new political belief systems that fuel the great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century. This is not merely an academic exercise but a moral imperative for people interested in finding answers to the pressing global problems of our time. For it is these new articulations of the global imaginary that have begun to offer us possible roadmaps to solving our energy crisis without adding to the pollution of our great green planet; to maintain our economic prosperity while reducing global disparities in wealth and wellbeing; and to combat new transnational forms of political violence without unleashing the nightmare of nuclear confrontation or perpetuating an ill-conceived ‘global war on terror’.

About the author:

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Global Studies and Director of the Globalism Research Center at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa. He has served as an academic consultant on globalization for the US State Department and as an advisor to the PBS TV series, “Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism.” He is the author of seventeen books on globalization and the history of political ideas, including: The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2008).

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Creating the Global Studies Curriculum – A Space for the Local?

July 13, 2009

Jack Luletulips-japan

In Fall 2006, Lehigh University created an undergraduate major in Global Studies. In this essay, I examine theoretical, methodological and pedagogical approaches ultimately chosen for the new curriculum. In particular, I consider our attempt to emphasize the local in our global study.[1]

Discrete research and teaching on global topics had gone at Lehigh for more than a century. However, the attacks of 9-11-01, just 90 minutes from our university, galvanized faculty and students to more fully internationalize Lehigh’s campus. Faculty took on the role of globalizing research and teaching.

One of our first theoretical and pedagogical decisions: Out of the many ways in which a university might internationalize curriculum and research, we decided to focus on globalization.

A number of factors lay behind the choice. One was focus. In some Global Studies programs, students choose from an array of courses, sometimes hundreds, tied together only by virtue of international content and concern. Globalization gave us a subject of study for teaching and research.

Another factor was the importance of the subject: No matter how it is defined – and we have some faculty who deny its existence – globalization must be considered one of the defining terms of modern life.

A third factor was its interdisciplinary potential: We have four colleges – 18 departments in the College of Arts and Sciences alone – and yet each discipline was engaged in studies that took up globalization.

In Spring 2006, we submitted a proposal to create the Globalization and Social Change Initiative. It was immediately accepted – and funded. I had headed one of the working groups and was asked to be director of the Initiative. By Fall 2006, we were up and running.

I should explain what is meant at Lehigh by an “Initiative.” The concept, at one level, is similar to a research institute or center. Primary functions of the Initiative are to foster and promote faculty research.

Yet at Lehigh, and other campuses, research institutes do not get involved with the undergraduate curriculum, nor do they sponsor extracurricular student clubs and activities.

The concept of an Initiative allows us to support almost any activity on campus that falls under the rubric of globalization and social change. We do traditional center activities, such as hosting research symposia and conferences. But we also created the undergraduate Global Studies major and plan a graduate degree in Global Studies. Too, we sponsor international student clubs and activities. The breadth is rich and satisfying.

Why an initiative in “globalization and social change?” Again, theoretical and pedagogical considerations guided us.

Globalization, we felt strongly, is not simply an economic process. This was important for us to emphasize as we worked alongside our colleagues from the business college.

We believe that globalization, while surely an economic process, is also historical, social, religious, cultural and political. Globalization and social change, we felt, signified our scope.

With our understanding of globalization and social change in place, we set out to situate that understanding within the curriculum. Like many programs, we felt that a primary strength of Global Studies is its interdisciplinary nature. We tried to create a markedly interdisciplinary curriculum (and courses).

An introductory course presents students with competing notions of globalization and then proceeds through modules, each showcasing how the study of globalization is undertaken in different disciplines: history, political economy, culture and anthropology, political science and international relations, communication, sociology and others.

Students then work their way through a core curriculum made up of course work from more than eight different departments, courses specifically tailored for the major: globalization and history; the political economy of globalization; culture and globalization; politics and globalization, global communication, globalization and religion, and more. Advanced electives and a capstone research seminar round out the curriculum.

However, the Global Studies curriculum is only one part of the major. Following the work of Appadurai (1996), Pieterse (2004), and others, we felt that globalization is fruitfully studied at the local level – “the global production of locality” (Appadurai, 1996, 188). We debated how to give our students experience and tools for understanding the ways globalization is negotiated within local contexts.

As a start, we require intermediate language proficiency of our students, the equivalent of four semesters. We encourage – and gave serious consideration to requiring – a major in a foreign language but ultimately felt the credit requirements for a double major would be too intense. But language is a tool for understanding and we wanted our students to at least experience language instruction, to understand the connection between language and culture, and to know that the world does not speak English.

We also require two courses in one Area Studies program (and strongly encourage at least a minor), such as Asian Studies, Latin American Studies, and others. Like Appadurai, we felt that Area Studies, though contested, still provide “a site for the examination of how locality emerges in a globalizing world” (18).

Finally, we require Study Abroad, either a full semester or two six-week summer sessions. We believe that immersion in another culture is essential for our students’ education. We help students seek out service learning projects while abroad.

With good advising, students match language, Area Studies and Study Abroad. For example, a Global Studies student studying Spanish will take Latin American Studies classes, and study and work in Chile. We encourage students, while abroad, to pursue the intersections of the global and local, of “how global facts take local form” (Appadurai, 18).

The program – the Global Studies curriculum with the localizing experiences of language instruction, area studies, and study abroad – is in its infancy. Still to be determined: What are the educational – and life – outcomes of this particular balance of global and local in study of globalization?

References

Appadurai, Arjun (1996). Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Pieterse, Jan Nederveen (2004). Globalization and Culture: Global Melange. New York: Rowman & Littlefield.

Jack Lule is the Joseph B. McFadden Distinguished Professor of Journalism and Director, Globalization and Social Change Initiative at Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA, USA

[1] Versions of this essay were presented to the Global Studies Conference, Chicago, Illinois, May 2008, and the Global Studies Association North America Annual Conference, New York, New York, June 2008.

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