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This article examines how different components of globalization affect the death toll from internal armed conflict. Conventional wisdom once held that the severity of internal conflict would gradually decline with the spread of globalization, but fatalities still remain high. Moreover, leading theories of civil war sharply disagree about how different aspects of globalization might affect the severity of ethnic and nonethnic armed conflicts. Using arguments from a variety of social science perspectives on globalization, civil war, and ethnic conflict to guide the analysis, this article finds that (1) economic globalization and cultural globalization significantly increase fatalities from ethnic conflicts, supporting arguments from ethnic competition and world-polity perspectives, (2) sociotechnical aspects of globalization increase deaths from ethnic conflict but decrease deaths from nonethnic conflict, and (3) regime corruption increases fatalities from nonethnic conflict, which supports explanations suggesting that the severity of civil war is greater in weak and corrupt states.

One of the main questions most of the globalization theorists have been dealing with is how to provide an adequate classification and systematization of vast and different theories of globalization. In this work we give a closer look to an infamous and highly influential Held's division of globalization theorists on globalists and skeptics. According to globalists globalization represents a real and significant historical process without a precedent, which generates new forms of global economy, global politics and global culture. On the other side, there are skeptics who discard globalization discourse simply as a myth or alternatively as an ideological project of the West. The first part of our investigation of the great globalization debate is dedicated to investigation of the globalist perspective (both the hyper-globalists and transformationists).

In an attempt to lay the groundwork for future analyses of the subject in Korea, the paper explores, drawing on the literature review, key issues in the controversy surrounding cultural globalization, namely, conceptualization of cultural globalizxation, cultural homogenization vs. diversification theses, the ascendancy of the cultural industry and commercial culture, issues in measuring cultural globalization, and government policy toward cultural globalization. Cultural globalization is a complex and multidimensional concept, and its definition should be approached as such. Cultural imperialism and Media imperialism represent cultural homogenization theories while such newer approaches as reception theory and hybridization advocate diversification thesis. There have been few attempts to measure cultural globalization. The existing scale is less than adequate, but improvements can be made with existing data. Cultural globalization is bringing about sweeping changes in the basic fabric of contemporary society. In government, cultural policy takes on new and expansive roles in order to cope with the pressures of cultural globalization. These range from developing cultural industries, building information infrastructure, to upgrading educational institutions to international standards.

"After World War II, communes and cooperative communities became internationally oriented in their membership and networking began to develop. Unlike earlier such enterprises, these groups shared an openness to international relationships. This was evident both in the groups' social composition, and in the extension of networks beyond their own country. Such globalization opened up the possibility of comparative analysis, which has become a trend in research since the 1950s. The dynamism and speed with which voluntary communities have spread throughout the world is impressive. In the 1950s there were only a few hundred such societies, but by the end of the last century there were thousands. These have taken a variety of forms. There are religious and secular communes, intentional communities, ecological communities, co-housing projects, various types of Christian communities, communities of Eastern religions, and spiritual communities inspired by New Age thought. Yaacov Oved shows that such societies maintain a community based on cooperation and expand their influence through newspapers, television, and the Internet. Their chief characteristic is their openness to the outside world, and their search for a way to move beyond a world of individualism and competitiveness. To accomplish this, they embrace all the tools of the modern world. Oved observes that those who predicted the failure of communes and intentional communities failed to appreciate the extent to which people in today's society aspire to communal life. This book answers the doubters and does so with a sense of deep historical understanding." -- Publisher.