Suchergebnisse

In the shadow of the nation-state, transnational dynamics and contacts operating from a non-national logic have been always present and are even increasingly so. Nation-state has never completely controlled all kinds of crossborder transactions, whether it be those directed by large international conglomerates, migrants, and refugee flows, or even the variety of illegal activities of transnational criminal organizations, be it pirating, maritime or other, be it slave trade, organ trafficking or even the lucrative drug trade, and others. Today, one cannot work from a single level of abstraction that revolves around nation-states and the "national." Such focus would miss on a wide range of power relations above and beyond states that involve crossborder dynamics. The range of transnational interactions associated with the process of globalization and alterglobalization constitute genuine and important challenge to our understanding of global politics. In this article, I argue, that political analysts need to engage in multiscalar analysis (meaning the coexistence and co-constitution of various spaces—local, national, regional, and global) and that they must also recognize that it is heuristically fruitful to apprehend global processes in a dialectical fashion. In short, to grasp the enigma of globalization and of its antithesis alterglobalization requires exploring innovative conceptual and methodological approaches.

In recent years, international nongovernment organizations (NGOs) and transnational networks involved in knowledge creation have become key civil-society actors in Southeast Asia. How and why has such form of transnational activism expanded significantly in the region? The author suggests that this type of activism is a response to socioeconomic and political processes associated with globalization, as well as a consequence of the relative and limited political liberalization that has characterized some Southeast Asian countries. The specific combination of these two factors is peculiar to the region since contemporary transnational activism in Western Europe and North America takes place within open democracies with well-established civil-society organizations. Moreover, trade liberalization and other global economic processes have not marked domestic dynamics as rapidly and suddenly as the economic boom of the 1980s and, eventually, the 1997 financial crisis did in certain Southeast Asian countries. To explore this argument, the paper traces the genealogy and analyzes the objectives and activities of four transnational activist organizations. Common to the four organizations is the central place of discourse and knowledge production and its linkages to mobilization, network building and constituency building, and a growing awareness that they are confronted with common challenges and share common targets.

"Development studies is in a state of flux. A new generation of scholars has come to reject what was once regarded as accepted wisdom, and increasingly regard development and globalization as part of a continuum with colonialism, premised on the same reductionist assumption that progress and growth are objective facts that can be fostered, measured, assessed and controlled. Drawing on a variety of theoretical perspectives and approaches, this book explores the ways in which social movements in the Global South are rejecting Western-centric notions of development and modernization, as well as creating their own alternatives. By assessing development theories from the perspective of subaltern groups and movements, the contributors posit a new notion of development 'from below', one in which these movements provide new ways of imagining social transformation, and a way out of the 'developmental dead end' that has so far characterized post-development approaches. Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization therefore represents a radical break with the prevailing narrative of modernization, and points to a bold new direction for development studies."--