Central Currents in Globalization

Central Currents in Globalization

Organizer
The Globalism Institute Melbourne, Australia
Venue
Location
Melbourne, Australia
Country
Australia
From - Until
01.06.2005 -
Website
By
James, Paul

The Overall Rationale

‘Central Currents in Globalization’ will be an integrated collection of sixteen edited volumes mapping the subject of globalization. It is intended as a landmark collection that sets out the contours of a bourgeoning field that now crosses the boundaries of all the older disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. As a comprehensive collection, it is developed for academic library acquisition across the world: for example, sections of its readership will the expanding Asian libraries that do not have extensive holdings of journal subscriptions. As a set of single volumes, the series is aimed at readers who want a selection of the most important articles in the field, together with innovative published writing that have been crucial to taking the field of globalization to the centre of scholarly thinking. Overall, and most importantly, the collection is intended to be the systematic mapping of the field of globalization studies as represented by English-language essays and translations.

The Criteria for the Selection Process

We will aim for a consistency of approach across all the volumes in terms of reach and selection criteria. Each volume will bring together a representative range of the most important English-language articles and translations in the various sub-themes of globalization. It will attempt at the same time to cover the major authors in the field, selecting work that is indicative of their approach. Each volume will also consider including a classic text from earlier writings that bear heavily upon contemporary thought, for example Karl Marx writing on ‘all that is solid melts into air’ or Max Weber on the classical empires. At the same time, the volumes will include lesser-known but important articles that fill out both the complexity of the field and carry the sense of the globalization of writings on globalization. In other words, we would intend to include writers from across the vast range of cultural, philosophical and political orientations in this area, not just from the dominant British and North American traditions. Each volume will be approximately 416 pages, including the 10,000 word introductions and the short section introductions. The material selected should give an overview of the field and include classical essays, avant-garde contributions, critical and mainstream material—the best writing in the field, taking into account the need to material from representative authors who have made a major contribution and well as some new authors who whose work is beginning to make a difference.

The Structure of the Series

In setting up the structure of each of the series, it was decided to use the fairly familiar categories of violence, economy, culture and the political as the organizational basis of the collection. The first of these categories—violence—has became an imperative for investigation in a world beset by the galloping violence associated with the War on Terror, but it is also a strangely overlooked category in globalization studies despite the extraordinary impact of the ‘world wars’ as globalizing phenomena. The other three more conventional categories gave sufficient range to allow for a systematic coverage of the material. The second set is on ‘Globalization and Culture’, allowing us to displace the overriding dominance, at least for a period in the mainstream, of economics as the defining feature of globalization. Economics taken very broadly, including the social theory, political economy and history of economics, is the subject of the third set. Finally, the last set is devoted to ‘the socio-political’, including issues of governance, political movements and direct political critique.
The four categories for organizing the series are obviously not mutually exclusive—they are overlapping and interdependent. The general editor’s role is to pay particular attention to these overlapping areas to make sure that the fields are being properly covered and that there is complementary coverage rather than repetition. It is important to see this as an integrated systematic series rather than just a collection of individual volumes loosely bound together.

Set 1. Globalization and Violence
Volume 1: Globalizing Empires: Old and New
Volume 2: Colonial and Postcolonial Globalizations
Volume 3: Globalizing War and Intervention
Volume 4: Transnational Conflict
Set 2. Globalization and the Economic
Volume 5: Global Markets and Capitalism
Volume 6: Global Finance and the New Global Economy
Volume 7: Global Economic Institutions
Volume 8: Globalizing Labour and Global Class
Set 3. Globalization and the Cultural
Volume 9: Global Communications
Volume 10: Global Religions
Volume 11: Global-Local Consumption
Volume 12: Ideologies of Globalism
Set 4 Globalization and the Political
Volume 13: Global Political and Legal Governance
Volume 14: Globalizing Movements and Global Civil Society
Volume 15: Political Critiques and Social Theories of the Global
Volume 16: Political Philosophies of the Global

Publications schedule

These deadlines are tight and not flexible. For the series to work we have to keep to the schedule.

Set 1 Violence
Final article list agreed June 2005
Published June 2006

Set 2 Economics
Final article list agreed November 2005
Published November 2006

Set 3 Culture
Final article list agreed June 2006
Published June 2007

Set 4 Politics
Final article list agreed November 2006
Published November 2007

The editors of the Central Currents in Globalization series are seeking previously published articles, not new or unpublished material. The series is a showcase for the most innovative or classical pieces in the field. Please send suggestions or articles in the form of PDFS to Professor Paul James, RMIT University - paul.james@rmit.edu.au

Programm

The Content in More Detail

Set 1. Globalization and Violence

‘Set 1’ takes one particular manifestation of human relations—violence—and explores its changing nature in relation to the effects of globalization. It is organized across the four volumes beginning with the historically-deep process of empire-building as a process of intended globalization as states sought to claim military and political control over extended reaches of territory (Volume 1). This is then brought through to contemporary debates about empire. Volume 2 takes up that story, but examines the process from the perspective of the periphery rather than from the centre. It begins with Second Expansion of Europe and colonization in the mid-nineteenth century, takes in the violence of decolonization across the world in the period through to the 1960s, and considers the question of postcolonial violence—not just military, but broader questions of structural violence today. Volume 3 examines the changing nature of military intervention, including the remarkable shift in the form of violence across the globe from interstate violence to intrastate conflict in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This volume includes a section on one of the most dramatic instances of global violence in our time— terrorism and the War on Terror. Finally, Volume 4 complements the third volume by examining the different forms of transnational and intra-state violence in the world today.

Volume 1: Globalizing Empires: Old and New

Edited by Paul James and Tom Nairn

1. Historical Developments: Early Empires, East and West
2. European World Empires
3. Globalization and Empire after September 11, 2001
4. Debating ‘Empire’
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Michael Mann, Immanuel Todd, Immanuel Wallerstein
—as well as classical writers such as John A. Hobson and Max Weber on empire

Description of the volume
Taking empire as a way in to the series allows us to cover vast historical ground from the early empires of the classical period, including most importantly the Romans, to the empires of East and West across the last two thousand years. It also then relates to one of the dominant literatures today on empire, including the book by Negri and Hardt. These writings on empire take up some of the themes of the earlier field of imperialism studies but pursue it from a different perspective.

Volume 2: Colonial and Postcolonial Globalization

Edited by Paul James and Phillip Darby

1. Historical Developments: Colonization and After
2. Narratives of Colonialism: Expressions of Pain
3. Narratives of Postcolonialism: Analyses of Violence
4. Debating the Clash between Traditionalism and Modernism
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Ali Mazrui, Chinua Achebe, Homi Bhabha, Partha Chatterjee, Franz Fanon, Walter Mignolo, Ashis Nandy, Gayatri Chakrabarty Spivak — as well as classical writers such as Karl Marx on colonialism,

Description of the volume
The previous volume on empire leads directly into this volume on colonization and decolonization. Whereas the previous volume examines ‘globalization from above’, this volume emphasizes what happens on the ground. It examines the globalizing effects on the many colonized regions of the world, with reference to the structural violence of domination. It allows us to include the new literature coming out of the field of postcolonialism, a literature that has a direct bearing on how we think about globalization today.

Volume 3: Globalizing War and Intervention

Edited by Paul James and Jonathan Freidman

1. Historical Developments: The Phenomenon of World Wars
2. From World Wars to Globalizing Wars
3. The War on Terror as a Global Conflict
4. Debating Humanitarian Intervention
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Jean Bethke-Elstain, Michael Ignatieff, Danilo Zolo, Ken Booth and many others — as well as classical writers such as Carl von Clausewitz and Otto Hinze on war

Description of the volume
War has been a telling phenomena contributing to the processes of globalization, one neglected in the literature of globalization studies until recently. This volume will cover the period of the twentieth century to the present, beginning with the massive consequences of two world wars. The volume will have a section on the contemporary War on Terror and the debate over humanitarian intervention as a part of an ideology of pax globalism and the changing nature of national sovereignty. The emphasis here moves back to ‘globalization from above’, while the following volume on ‘Transnational Conflict’ returns to how violence figures in ‘globalization from below’.

Volume 4: Transnational Conflict

Edited by Paul James and Ram Rattan Sharma

1. Historical Developments
2. Refugees, Slaves and Regimes of Global Displacement
3. Diasporas and Transnational Violence
4. Debating the Sources of Insecurity
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Benedict Anderson, Kevin Bales, Robin Blackburn, Stephen Castles, David Chandler, Amy Chua, Eugene Fox-Genovese, Paul Gilroy, Ashis Nandy — as well as classical writers such as Thucydides on the Peloponnesian war

Description of the volume
This volume would begin with the first expansion of the European empires, including the development of the slave trade as a form of global violence and the frontier violence of culture contact. (This would relate to Volume 1 that would concentrate more on the structural conditions of the globalizing empires of Europe). However, after the first section on historical background, the emphasis of the volume would be on the period after the 1960s. It would not need to cover the violence of decolonization directly with more than a single reference because that period will be covered by Volume 2. Rather it would concentrate on contemporary transnational conflict: contemporary processes of border-crossing including the international slave trade, refugees as fleeing from conflict, the modern diasporas and long-distance support for nationalist conflicts, and simmering conflict between nations such as India and Pakistan, China and Taiwan, Rwanda and the Congo. The ‘sources of insecurity’ debate refers to the contention over whether the violence arises from local or global sources, immediate changes on the ground and local enmities or more generalized shifts brought about by the changing nature of state formation and international relations.

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Set 2. Globalization and Economy

Volume 5: Global Markets and Capitalism

Edited by Paul James and Barry Gills

1. Historical Developments: The Emergence of a Global Market
2. World-Economic Systems
3. Development, Dependency and Inequality
4. Debating a ‘Borderless World’
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Janet Abu-Lughod, Andre Gunder Frank, Paul Hurst and Graeme Thompson, Immanuel Wallerstein, Eric Wolf — as well as classical writers such as Adam Smith

Description of the volume
Trade and market relations have been another of the driving forces of globalization, with contemporary capitalism so bound up with processes of global production and exchange that it is difficult to extricate social relations from their grip. This volume begins with the beginning of what some writers have called the ‘world system’ and examines the relationship between global trade, commodity relations and economic development. It covers the two major radical approaches to global markets—world systems theory and dependency theory—as well as more mainstream takes on economic globalization.

Volume 6: Global Finance and the New Global Economy

Edited by Paul James and Philip G. Cerny

1. Historical Developments: From the Gold Standard to Global Finance
2. Futures Trading
3. The New Dominant Global Economy
4. Debating the Regulation of Global Capitalism
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Danny Rodik, Saskia Sassen, Joseph Stiglitz, Susan Strange, (Heikki Patomäki on the Tobin tax) — as well as classical writers such as Vladimir Lenin

Description of the volume
This volume is focused on globalization and money, finance and taxation, linking it to the new form of knowledge-based economies. This is a growing field of studies, particularly in the light of the extraordinary changes in the nature of the global economy over the past few decades. Concomitant with the development of electronic codification as a new dominant means of communication, the overlaying of coinage and paper money by electronic exchange systems was fast, confusing and increasing integrated with the modes of production and organization. It was something that a classical social theorist such as Marx could not envisage despite his understanding of money as a material abstraction. Although many of the developments had slow antecedents, the changes multiplied quickly. Traded derivatives, for example—that is, ‘contracts specifying rights and obligations which are based upon, and thus derive their value from, the performance of some underlying instrument, investment, currency, commodity or service index, right or rate’—developed from the 1970s and grew exponentially from the mid-1980s. By the turn of the century, they amounted to an estimated US$70 trillion or eight times the annual GDP of the United States.

Volume 7: Global Economic Institutions

Edited by Paul James and Ronen Palan

1. Historical Developments: The Rise of Global Agreements and Corporations
2. Transnational Corporations and Globalization
3. Transnational Economic Institutions and Globalization
4. Debating Global Economic Governance
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Vincent Cable, Danny Rodrik, Joseph Stiglitz — as well as classical writers such as Mosca and Michels

Description of the volume
Global institutions such as transnational corporations and forums of economic governance from WTO, the World Bank, the IMF to the World Economic Forum—are a central part of our globalizing world. They are the brunt of the critique of the anti-corporate globalization movement discussed in Volume 14. The present volume discusses the institutions in global context, examining the patterns of change and the place of these institutions in the world from the end of the nineteenth century to the present. The volume includes material debating the place of these institutions, but the emphasis is on understanding their power and influence. This volume focuses on economic global governance while Volume 13 takes up political and legal global governance.

Volume 8: Globalizing Labour and Global Class

Edited by Paul James and Robert O’Brien

1. Historical Developments: From National to Global Division of Labour
2. Labour, Class and Development
3. Labour Mobility and Migration
4. Debating Labour Standards
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Richard Hyman, Ronaldo Munk, Leslie Sklair, — as well as classical writers such as Frederick Engels

Description of the volume
As a parallel to the previous volume on the institutions of global economic governance, the present volume begins with the emergence of the global federations of labour in the nineteenth century and into the twentieth. It examines the changing nature of class and labour to the present, including the rise of a global labour movement.

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Set 3. Globalization and Culture

Volume 9: Global Communications

Edited by Paul James and John Tulloch

‘Global Communications: A Critical Introduction’, John Tulloch and Paul James
1. Historical developments: Establishing Global Communications Networks
2. International News, Film and Television
3. News Wars – Liberal Globalization
4. The World Wide Web and the Internet
5. Debating Technologies of Globalization
6. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Manuel Castells, Ariel Dorfman and Amand Mattelart, Edward Herman. Mark Poster — as well as classical writers such as Walter Benjamin

Description of the volume
This volume takes up the theme of communications beginning with the expansion of the technologies of long-distance communication in the late-nineteenth century, and into the rise of global news services in the early twentieth century. The volume includes material on the changing technologies of communication, including the development of the World Wide Web and the internet.

Volume 10: Global Religions

Edited by Paul James and Peter Mandaville

1. Historical Developments: The Rise of the World Religions
2. Missionaries, Proselytizers and the Globalization of the Word
3. Religion and the Globalization of Values
4. Debating the ‘Clash of Civilizations’
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Roland Robertson, Samuel Huntington, Mark Juergensmeyer, Dieter Senghaas — as well as classical writers such as Emile Durkheim

Description of the volume
The religions of the book were globalizing almost from their inception. Religion was central to processes of globalization in the expansions of empire from the early mediaeval period, through the Second Expansion of Europe to the contemporary proselytizing of Christianity and Islam in the present War on Terror. This volume takes questions of religion and cultural globalization very broadly, including discussions of the Bible as a global text to the debate over the ‘Clash of Civilizations’.

Volume 11: Global-Local Consumption

Edited by Paul James and Imre Szeman

1. Historical Developments
2. Contemporary Cultures: Global and Local
3. Global Literatures and World Music
4. The ‘McDonaldization’ Debate
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Arjun Appadurai, James Clifford, Arif Dirlik, Stuart Hall, Ulf Hannerz, Mike Featherstone, Franco Moretti, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, George Ritzer - as well as a classical writer such as Veblen or Lukacs

Description of the volume
This volume brings together essays that examine global-local consumption in two different, if increasingly related, ways. The processes associated with globalization have created hitherto unimaginable opportunities for cultural forms and practices to travel far beyond the indigenous sites and spaces in which they were first conceived and produced. While there have always been cultural movements and flows from one space to another, the intensity and extensity of contemporary intersections of the global and the local has forced scholars to look closely at the myriad ways in which culture is consumed—used up, made sense of, embraced, explored—at the present moment. In this sense of cultural ‘consumption’, the essays look at the difficult questions of cultural diversity and authenticity that have shaped much of the discussion around culture in/and globalization, by looking at the transformation of older cultural forms and the creation of new forms of global-local culture, such as global literatures and world music. This first sense of consumption is often haunted by the second, more common usage of the term: consumption as a central practice of consumer societies. Though explorations of culture in reference to global-local circulations highlight the emergence of new and changed cultural forms, more often the flow of the global to the local (and vice-versa) has been viewed as a process of cultural loss. This loss is in part the consequence of the spread through culture of the values of capitalist modernity, which in turn has been figured culturally as a society defined by consumption. How and why the cultural flows of globalization produce cultural forms that reinforce consumption, or how they generalize an understanding of culture that is itself intimately related to consumption (culture as the ‘purchase’ of meaning-making experiences after a day of labour”), will be the second main theme addressed by these essays.

Volume 12: Ideologies of Globalism

Edited by Paul James and Manfred B. Steger

1. Historical Developments: From Heliocentrism to Globalism
2. Dominant Ideologies of the Present, I: Neoliberalism
3. Dominant Ideologies of the Present, II: From Nostalgia to Militarism
4. The ‘Jihad versus McWorld’ Debate
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Richard Falk, James Mittelman, Spike Petersen, Mark Rupert, Barkawi — as well as classical writers from Karl Marx and Antonio Gramsci to Karl Mannheim

Description of the volume
This volume is concerned to map the many ideologies of globalism beginning with the heliocentrism associated with classical astronomy and cartography to the development of neo-liberalism as one of the dominant ideologies of our time. For the purpose of this volume, ideologies are distinguished from philosophies of globalism, although of course all philosophies of globalization such as cosmopolitanism and internationalism are profoundly ideological. This volume puts the emphasis on how globalization is used ideologically or how the ideology of globalization is used to legitimize and naturalize cultural, political, and economic practices.

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Set 4. Globalization and the Political

Volume 13: Global Political and Legal Governance

Edited by Paul James and Robyn Eckersley

1. Historical developments: From Westphalia to the United Nations
2. Globalization and the Nation-State
3. Global Legal Regimes: Tribunals, Courts and Commissions
4. Debating Global Climate Change
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Richard Falk, David Held, John Gerard Ruggie, Ann-Marie Slaughter — as well as classical writers such as Grotius

Description of the volume

This volume focuses on global governance, including its relation to the nation-state as a continuing polity in the era of intense globalization. It examines the new multilateral regimes in the legal and political domains with a special emphasis on the United Nations.

Volume 14: Globalizing Movements and Global Civil Society

Edited by Paul James and Paul van Seters

1. Historical Developments: The Rise of Global Spaces and Movements
2. Globalizing Social Movements, I: From Nationalism to Environmentalism
3. Globalizing Social Movements, II: Anti-Corporate Globalization after Seattle
4. Debating Global Civil Society
5. Critical Projections

Description of the volume
Volume 14 complements the previous volume, consistent with other volumes in the series, moving to the theme of ‘globalization from below’ after discussing the patterns of institutional development from ‘above’. The focus here is threefold, with the connecting theme being globalizing political movements. First, the volume examines the rise of a global civil society; secondly (adding material to that already partly covered in Volume 2 in relation to decolonization) the volume addresses globalizing movements as diverse as environmentalism and nationalism, particularly in relation to pan-Arabism or pan-Africanism. Thirdly, the volume turns to the contemporary anti-corporate globalization movement.

Volume 15: Political Critiques and Social Theories of the Global

Edited by Paul James and Justin Rosenberg

1. Historical Developments
2. Contemporary Theories
3. Contemporary Critiques
4. Debating the Possibilities and Horrors of Globalization
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Jonathan Friedman, Roland Robertson, Jan Aart Scholte, Justin Rosenberg, James M. Mittleman

Volume 16: Political Philosophies of the Global

Edited by Paul James and Micheline Ishay

1. Historical Developments: Philosophical Conjectures
2. Cosmopolitanism and Internationalism
3. Global Human Rights and Ethics
4. Debating the Relationship Between Globalization and Democracy
5. Critical Projections

Key writers to consider
Perry Anderson, Daniele Archibugi, Martha Nussbaum, Bryan Turner —as well as classical writers such as Kant on perpetual peace or Hegel

Contact (announcement)

Paul James
Professor of Globalism and Cultural Diversity
Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology
Australia

E-mail paul.james@rmit.edu.au
Phone: +61 3 9925 2500 (w) +61 3 9481 1570 (h)


Editors Information
Published on
17.03.2006
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