Suchergebnisse

The theme of the 90th annual meeting of theAmerican Sociological Association is "Community of Communities: Shaping Our Future." The program asks three leading questions: must the plurality of community ties now identifying themselves throughout the world along ethnic, racial, gender, religious, and other lines ... be blended away to ensure civility? Or, can we have a society of vying tribes without shared bonds and values? Or can there be a shared frameworkin which many colorful elements find a new place ... [in] a "community of communities?"

Warren Wagar's 1995 ASA paper is an attempt to articulate a view of global political praxis culminating in a "democratic, liberal, and socialist world commonwealth." This is an admirable idea, but do the ideas in that paper get us closer to its realization--I think not. As I will argue below, Wagar's paper is nothing more than the Third International writ large, a polemic on organizational form ironically tied to a Eurocentric Second International view of the world that appears to ignore the historical lessons of both efforts.

There is much in Warren Wagar's paper with which I agree. He questions the viability of a multiculturalist politics, draws our attention to the problematical nature of many movements that world-system theory would deem "antisystemic," and rejects "a purely relativistic multiculturalism." Similarly, I have addressed the deficiencies of political cultural movements based on various claims of identity (sec Moghadam, 1994), argued against a "mindless cultural relativism" (Moghadam, 1989), and described a secular intellectualism in the Middle East (Moghadam, 1990). I would agree with Wagar that the "ideology of a Left Enlightenment" holds the best promise for the future--but up to a point. I would also be much in favour of a World Party-but with some qualifications. There are gaps in Wagar's scenario. His rejection of all contemporary social movements as equally incapable of helping to effect a progressive trans formative politics (global democratic socialism) is both politically and methodologically flawed.

Theoretical discourses that emphasize difference, fragmentation and contingency have presented various challenges to the social sciences of today. The political implications of these discourses have generally been expressed in rather vague terms and often simply left unspecified. In this context, W. Warren Wagar's bold and provocative defence of the universalist values of the European Enlightenment is a most welcome contribution.

This paper develops a spatial perspective to examine the nature of China's transnational influence, focusing on the implications of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) for international relations. Drawing upon political economy, regional studies and critical geopolitics, we argue that the most interesting puzzle concerning the BRI pertains to the ongoing reconfigurations of political space. Contemporary sociospatial reconfigurations as analyzed through a multidimensional framework offer key insights into the operations and the extent of China's growing global power in general and with respect to the BRI in particular. We draw on a broad range of materials such as maps, Chinese academic and policy discourse as well as observations about corridor projects to theorize a) how the spatiality of global and regional connectivity is reconfigured through the process of China's integration with the world; and b) how corridorization as a dominant physical and ideational process shapes Chinese investment projects and reconfigures state spatiality along the BRI. The results indicate that the main territorial pattern is not the nation or the region but the corridor. Furthermore, expansionist and unidirectional stories of China's growing power overlook the local encounters and negotiations necessary for infrastructure projects to succeed. In addition, China's economic statecraft is contextualized within the ongoing post-financial crisis political-economic restructuring of territories, places, and scales within the global capitalist system.