What Is Critical Globalization Studies?

From a critical perspective, precisely what kind of knowledge about globalization is meaningful? The distinctive province of a critical orientation to globalization is coming to be defined by a complex of five interacting components: reflexivity, historicism, decentering, crossovers between social inquiry and other streams of knowledge, and an emphasis on strategic transformations. Critical globalization studies may be employed to identify diverse tendencies in world order, parts of a contradictory whole that coexist, with different logics colliding with one another. These are elements of the old configuration, multilateral globalization ; the contemporary structure, militarized globalization ; and the potential constellation, democratic globalization . The motor of transformation is not only countervailing power but also alternative knowledge, which should be demystifying and enabling.     

Globalization: An Ascendant Paradigm?

International Studies is on the cusp of a debate between para-keepers , observers who are steadfast about maintaining the prevailing paradigms and deny that globalization offers a fresh way of thinking about the world, and para-makers , who bring into question what they regard as outmoded categories and claim to have shifted to an innovatory paradigm. This distinction is a heuristic that allows for various gradations and dynamic interactions between the keepers and the makers. It helps to identify anomalies in and discomfort with International Studies. Partly as a response to these problems, globalization studies has evolved and may be tentatively delimited by a distinct set of characteristics. But, in the near term, there is no looming Kuhnian crisis in the sense of an impending overthrow that would quickly sweep away reigning paradigms. Given that systematic research on globalization is only slightly more than a decade in the making, it is most likely that International Studies has entered an interregnum between the old and the new. At this time, as a paradigm, globalization is more of a potential than a worked-out framework. It may be best understood as a proto-paradigm.     

Multiple paraphilic diagnoses among sex offenders

The psychiatric literature suggests that paraphiliacs can be expected to participate in only one type of deviant sexual behavior. Using self-reports gathered with assured confidentiality from 561 nonincarcerated paraphiliacs, we discovered that most paraphiliacs have had significant experience with as many as ten different types of deviant sexual behavior without regard, in many cases, to gender, age, and familial relationship of the victim. The relevance of these findings to our understanding of paraphiliacs and their treatment is discussed.     

Globalisation and environmental resistance politics

Abstract

Based on extensive fieldwork in Eastern Asia, an epicentre of globalisation, and Southern Africa, a key node in the most marginalised continent, this cross-regional study asks: what constitutes resistance to neoliberal globalisation? An ecological reading of master theorists of resistance, especially Polanyi, focuses attention on protectionist movements as a response to the spread and deepening of the market—solid patterns and cumulative action—and to a lesser degree, on the soft, or latent, forms of protest that may or may not sufficiently harden so as eventually to challenge globalising structures. Attention is given to submerged forms of resistance within civil society insofar as they are emerging into networks. The empirical evidence includes interviews designed to elicit the voices of the subjects of globalisation engaged in environmental resistance politics. Counter-globalisation strategies are identified, and the impact of countervailing forces is assessed.     

Beyond Impoverished Anti-poverty Paradigms

More subtle than the manifestations of poverty are the paradigmatic means of sustaining, deepening or lessening it. Indeed, dominant knowledge structures are insinuated in policy making and conventional anti-poverty measures, some of which reflect the poverty of the intellect. Ensconced in distinctive contexts, poverty itself is shaped by the template of neoliberal globalisation. This paradigm promises that economic gain will benefit all who are faithful to its principles. It evokes a vision not only of economic well-being but also of distributive justice, including poverty reduction. In its centrist and reformist guises, the orthodox anti-poverty paradigm may be best understood as a chain of relationships: neoliberal concepts, a preoccupation with methods for measuring results, a loathness to tackle underlying factors that generate widespread privation, gender ideology, and the delinking of economic reform and social policy. On the rise, too, is growing resistance to this consensual thinking, mainly from transnational civil society organisations and allied intellectuals. Six priorities are suggested as the basis for forming multiple, decentred paradigms to expunge poverty. The challenge is to produce homegrown knowledge structures that open to learning from other experiences.     

The Salience of Race

While the salience of race is rising in public discourse, the dominant knowledge structure in international studies has deflected this issue. A look at curriculum and research programs suggests that the transnational dimensions of race are sidelined. The core concept of state sovereignty rarely opens to questions of race. Yet there is a longstanding tradition in transnational race relations, including substantial literature and university initiatives. These have had a tangible impact on the activities of international organizations. To restart such efforts in ways appropriate for our times, it is suggested that six sets of interaction between globalization and race could form the core of a curriculum and research program. This foundation provides the basis for explaining how the politics of "we" and "they," friends and enemies, operates in racializing questions of identity, especially after 9/11, when inclusion and exclusion are increasingly securitized.     

Globalization: Captors and captive

Globalization studies are not really global. Rather, globalization research mainly centres on, and emanates from, the OECD countries. To begin to change the balance, it is important to pose a set of pertinent and penetrating research questions. Animated by theoretical and empirical research undertaken largely in southeast Asia, these questions call for painstaking analyses of dominant moral codes, various actors' attempts to turn the globalization scenario to advantage, cultural and political struggles to assert some control over market forces, and tensions within a framework based on neoliberal values and policies. The act of capturing establishes a hierarchy between the captor and the captive. This hierarchy is not a dichotomy, but an ordering of power and a division of labour. The captors of course seek to remain on top, and the captured attempt to ascend from the bottom of the heap. Such structural and dynamic relationships must be contextualized and, today, are integral to the epochal transformation known as globalization.