The African continent has experienced too many violent conflicts leading to much loss of life, destruction of infrastructure, disruption of productive socio-economic activity, displacement of hundreds of thousands of people, and the diversion of scarce resources towards arms procurement. It is clear to all that for sustainable development of the African continent, it is important that policy makers and all levels of society understand Africa's security challenges so that all may work towards sustainable peace and security for the African continent. This book is a collection of papers, most of them written for the journal African Renaissance, by prominent African scholars and practitioners who seek to understand the various causes of African conflicts, the many forms and different dimensions that these conflicts have taken, their devastating effects and the challenges for sustainable peace and security on the African continent. The book is proudly blessed by the inclusion (with permission) of the report of the outgoing United Nations Secretary General Kofi Anan entitled "The Causes of Conflict and the Promotion of Durable Peace and Sustainable Development in Africa." The book is aimed at policy makers, academics, students, and for all who are interested in peace, security and sustainable development on the African continent. ________________________________________ Dr. Mlambo was born in Zimbabwe and holds a B.A. (Honours) degree in Economic History from the University of Zimbabwe and a Ph.D. in History from the University of Cape Town in South Africa. A qualified helicopter pilot, he did his pilot training in Romania and Canada and served as a pilot with the Air Force of Zimbabwe for 13 years, and rising to the rank of Squadron Leader. Dr Mlambo has been a lecturer at the University of Zimbabwe, a Research Fellow on the Peace and Security Research Programme of the SAPES Trust in Harare, and Editor of the Daily Mirror, a privately owned newspaper in Harare. He is currently Head of the Peace and Security Research Unit at Africa Institute of South Africa.

In this book, ten substantive chapters examine how collisions between technological developments (globalizing forces) and thickening populist pressures (localizing dynamics) constantly keep reinventing the state in unforeseen and unpredictable ways. We learn of how international organizations have fared, and to what extent grass-roots grumbles have impacted big-picture developments in quite diverse parts of the world. Just placing unfolding crises under the microscope cannot but generate policy-solving observations. Treated in corresponding order, these crises revolve around adjusting international institutions; absorbing current populist outbursts; shifting from peacekeeping to peacemaking; spying in the global south; absorbing displaced persons; Rwandan land reform; pandemic and RMG readjustments; Bangladesh's democratic transition; Rohingyan-Syrian refugees; and Mexico's 1990s liberalization. Though overarching, observations in the book accent state strength battling with state porosity; the downward spiraling of global order; and the simple lack of any controlling mechanism against globalizing/localizing dynamics in the trenches of everyday life being matched by continued uncertainty on the analytical plane.

Asian Alleyways: An Urban Vernacular in Times of Globalization critically explores "Global Asia" and the metropolization process, specifically from its alleyways, which are understood as ordinary neighbourhood landscapes providing the setting for everyday urban life and place-based identities being shaped by varied everyday practices, collective experiences and forces. Beyond the mainstream, standardising vision of the metropolization process, Asian Alleyways offers a nuanced overview of urban production in Asia at a time of great changes, and will be welcomed by an array of scholars, students, and all those interested in the modern transformation of Asian cities and their urban cultures.

In sub-Saharan Africa, mobile technology has developed at a rapid pace and the numbers of mobile users have increased faster than those in the rest of the world. The underlying question of how mobile journalism and social media may support African citizens and contribute to social change forms the basis of this book. A qualitative content analysis provides the methodological framework to interpret the interviews with professional and citizen journalists and media experts. The results suggest that mobile and social media contribute to the plurality of journalism in Zimbabwe, Zambia and South Africa. Mobile and social media reporters are aware of ethical questions and journalistic standards; at the same time, they connect with local communities and adopt an advocative and subjective approach.

During the past decade, the world reached the point of becoming more urban than not, as the majority of people on the planet now live not in small towns or villages but in provincial, national, and global cities. Scholars have long been fascinated by so-called global cities, world cities, and the urban engines of the global economy. James H. Spencer argues, however, that such an emphasis misses the central fact that urbanization goes well beyond the usual suspects of New York, Tokyo, London, and Shanghai. The author charts urbanization across the Global South and North, resulting in what he describes as a planetary global urban ecosystem. This concept that challenges us to realize that in daily life, their similar physical and social ecosystems that make cities more understandable to each other than to their own rural hinterlands. Spencer s vivid case studies of Addis Ababa, Ho Chi Minh City, Honolulu, and New York draw out the commonalities of our intertwined built and social environments and how they express a shared humanity across continents and cultures."

The volume offers an overview of the economic, political and cultural factors that influence the production of literature. By bringing together the research areas of literary criticism and book history, the volume focuses on narrative strategies, metaphors and tropes that reflect the market as a network of multi-conglomerates, authors, translators and readers. The global scope of the different contributions unites analyses of German, English, Spanish, French, Scandinavian, Indian and South African literature. The contributors attend carefully to the economic contexts of the literary production while simultaneously addressing the market's influence on content and form. Thoughts on poetological reflections of economic phenomena complement studies concerning the means of production and vice versa.

Scarce attention has been paid to the dimension of sound and its essential role in constructing image, culture, and identity in Chinese film and media. China in the Mix fills a critical void with the first book on the sound, languages, scenery, media, and culture in post-Socialist China. In this study, Ying Xiao explores fascinating topics, including appropriations of popular folklore in the Chinese new wave of the 1980s; Chinese rock 'n' roll and youth cinema in fin de siecle China; the political-economic impact of free market imperatives and Hollywood pictures on Chinese film industry and filmmaking in the late twentieth century; the reception and adaptation of hip hop; and the emerging role of Internet popular culture and social media in the early twenty-first century. Xiao examines the articulations and representations of mass culture andeveryday life, concentrating on their aural/oral manifestations in contemporary Chinese cinema and in a wide spectrum of media and cultural productions. China in the Mix offers the first comprehensive investigation of Chinese film, expressions, and culture from a unique, cohesiveacoustic angle and through the prism of global media-cultural exchange. It shows how the complex, evolving uses of sound (popular music, voice-over, silence, noise, and audio mixing) in film and media reflect and engage the important cultural and socio-historical shifts in contemporary China and in the increasingly networked world. Xiao offers an innovative new conception of Chinese film and media and their audiovisual registers in the historiographical frame of China amid the global landscape.

Globalization is a phenomenon which has attracted much attention in the past, but there are still many questions that remain unanswered. This book categorizes globalization into three types: Financial Globalization, the collapse of the Cold War order and the ensuing convergence toward the capitalistic system; and the rise of the emerging nations. The globalization of capitalism has two implications. One is trust in the market economy system and support for a minimal state while another is an aspect of the Casino Capitalism as typically seen by the rampant emergence of hedge funds. This book explores both the light and shadows cast by globalization, endeavoring to identify both positive and problematic effects of the globalization process on the world economy. For this purpose we would first examine the nature and the feature of the world capitalism in relation to globalization. Then we would discuss and investigate the path along which important nations - first the developed nations (the USA, EU and Japan), followed by the emerging nations (BRICs) - have proceeded under the influence of globalization. Focusing on this phenomenon from diverse points of view, which is to be taken by the first-rank contributors in their fields, will be extraordinarily fruitful for understanding not only the world capitalism. This collection, from a selection of leading international contributors, will not only shed light on world capitalism as it is now, but will also offer pointers as to its future directions.

Reclaiming the Commons: Biodiversity, Traditional Knowledge, and the Rights of Mother Earth lays out the scientific, legal, political, and cultural struggle to defend the sovereignty of biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Corporate war on nature and people through patents and corporate Intellectual Property Rights has unleashed an epidemic of biopiracy resulting in important legal battles fighting efforts to patent the rights to many plants, including basmati, neem, and wheat. The author presents details of the specific attempts made by corporations to secure these patents and the legal actions taken to fight them. The book goes beyond the legal struggle to position the necessary solutions to corporate control including the exploring the Rights of Nature and proposing a framework for a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth. It is the first detailed legal history of the international and national laws related to biodiversity and Intellectual Property Rights.

This book concerns with the analysis of the impact of globalization on international migration from a distinct international political economy perspective. It confronts theoretical debates from the different international political economy (IPE) approaches and elaborates on the implications of different theories in policymaking and political realms. Here, migration is examined as an integral part of the global political economy that is structurally connected to the process of globalization, although the definition of globalization itself is a subject of enquiry.

This volume comprises some twenty articles, speeches and conversations of Fei Xiaotong from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. Their central connecting theme is how civilizations could co-exist against a backdrop of rapid globalization. Fei proposes his concept of "cultural self-awareness," summarized in the axiom "each appreciates his own best, appreciates the best of others, all appreciate the best together for the greater harmony of all." This is the result of many years of research and fieldwork, and represents a synthesis of his Western training and traditional Chinese thought. Professor Fei Xiaotong was one of the most prominent Chinese sociologists and anthropologists in the last century, and a leading figure in Chinese intellectual circles. He was noted in the West for his Peasant Life in China, From the Soil and other works written during the 1930s and 1940s. His later important research and theoretical concepts, though extremely influential in China on both theoretical and practical levels, are almost unknown in international academia.

This book presents the results of the MIDA-project - the impact of labour migra-tion from the Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to the Danish labour market. In addition, it includes chapters that focus on labour mobility in other EU countries. The project stems from collaboration between researchers from the former CoMID (the Research Center for the Study of Migration and Diversity) at Aalborg University and the Department of Occupational Medicine at the Regional Hospital West Jutland.

At the opening ceremony for the London 2012 Olympics, a global audience of nearly one billion viewers were treated to the unprecedented sight of James Bond meeting Queen Elizabeth II. Shortly after, the 'Queen' hurled herself out of a helicopter, her Union Jack parachute guiding her down to the Olympic Stadium. What it is about moments such as these that define both a particular idea of Britishness and a particular type of British film comedy? How has British cinema exploited parody as a means of negotiating its sense of identity? How does this function within a globalized marketplace and in the face of dominant Hollywood cinema? Beyond a Joke explores the myriad ways British film culture has used forms of parody, from the 1960s to the present day. It provides a contextual and textual analysis of a range of works that, while popular, have only rarely been the subject of serious academic attention - from Morecambe and Wise to Shaun of the Dead to the London 2012 Olympics' opening ceremony. Combining the methodologies both of film history and film theory, Beyond a Joke locates parody within specific industrial and cultural moments, while also looking in detail at the aesthetics of parody as a mode. Ultimately, such works are shown to be a form of culturally specific film or televisual product for exporting to the global market, in which 'Britishness', shaped in self-mocking and ironic terms, becomes the selling point. Written in an accessible style and illustrated throughout with a diverse range of examples, Beyond a Joke is the first book to explore parody within a specifically British context and makes an invaluable contribution to the scholarship on both British and global film culture.

The ascent of globalisation tells the sweeping historical drama of the development of globalisation, from the Second World War to the present day. The story is told through the richly detailed accounts of eighteen remarkable men and women, describing how these architects reshaped the modern world, for better or worse. Profiling their lives, ideas and struggles reveals fresh insights into the nature of globalisation. The book also examines their legacies, shedding new light on many of the problems the world faces today: the global financial crisis, the political and economic malaise afflicting Europe, the numerous failures of the United Nations, the unchecked power of corporations and the inability of governments to cooperate on critical issues such as climate change. -- .

This brilliant new book by one of Europe's leading social thinkers throws light on the global power games being played out between global business, nation states and movements rooted in civil society. Beck offers an illuminating account of the changing nature of power in the global age and assesses the influence of the ever-expanding counter-powers.

The author puts forward the provocative thesis that in an age of global crises and risks, a politics of "golden handcuffs" - the creation of a dense network of transnational interdependencies - is exactly what is needed in order to regain national autonomy, not least in relation to a highly mobile world economy. It is imperative that the maxim of nation-based realpolitik - that national interests have necessarily to be pursued by national means - be replaced by the maxim of cosmopolitan realpolitik. The more cosmopolitan our political structures and activities, Beck suggests, the more successful they will be in promoting national interests, and the greater our individual power in this global age will be.

For decades, scholars and journalists have hailed the enormous potential of Brazil, which has for the last twenty years been one of the world's largest economies. But its promise has too often been curtailed by dictatorship, racism, poverty, and violence. Offering an interdisciplinary approach to the critical issues facing Brazil, the contributors to this volume analyze the democratization of the country's media, its potentiality as a nuclear power, the spread of neo-Protestantism, the development of popular culture, the global impact of Brazilian agribusiness, and the implementation of sustainable economic development, especially in the Amazon. Grouped with Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the other socalled BRICS countries) as one of the world's emerging economies, Brazil is unique in the Western hemisphere and on the global stage. The wide-ranging contributors also examine the exportation of Brazilian trends, institutions, culture, and religion through the accelerating processes of globalization. Emergent Brazil is a comprehensive and timely collection of essays that explore major Brazilian domestic concerns from the country's turbulent history to its restless present.

The world s most popular sport, soccer is a global and cultural phenomenon. The television audience for the 2010 World Cup included nearly half of the world s population, with viewers in nearly every country. As a reflection of soccer s significance, the sport impacts countless aspects of the world s culture, from politics and religion to business and the arts. In The World through Soccer: The Cultural Impact of a Global Sport, Tamir Bar-On utilizes soccer to provide insights into worldwide politics, religion, ethics, marketing, business, leadership, philosophy, and the arts. Bar-On examines the ways in which soccer influences and reflects these aspects of society, and vice versa. Each chapter features representative players, providing specific examples of how soccer comments on and informs our lives. These players selected from a wide array of eras, countries, and backgrounds include Diego Maradona, Pele, Hugo Sanchez, Cha Bum-Kun, Roger Milla, Jose Luis Chilavert, Zinedine Zidane, Paolo Maldini, Cristiano Ronaldo, Xavi, Neymar, Clint Dempsey, Mia Hamm, and many others. Employing a unique lens to view a variety of topics, The World through Soccer reveals the sport s profound cultural impact. Combining philosophical, popular, and academic insights about our world, this book is aimed at both soccer fans and academics, offering readers a new perspective into a sport that affects millions."

This edited book explores the impact of globalisation on the relationship between religion and politics, religion and nation, religion and nationalism, and the impact that transnationalism has on religious groups. In a post-Westphalian and transnational world, with increased international communication and transportation, a plethora of new religious recompositions religions now take part in a network society that cuts across borders. This collection, through its analysis of historical and contemporary case studies, explores the growth of both national and transnational religious movements and their dealings with the various versions of modernity that they encounter. It considers trends of religious revitalisation and secularisation, and processes of nationalism and transnationalism through the prism of the theory of multiple modernities, acknowledging both its pluralist world view but also the argument that its definition of modernity is often so inclusive as to lose coherence. Providing a cutting edge take on 21st century religion and globalization, this volume is a key read for all scholars of religion, secularisation and transnationalism.

Presenting an ethnographic account of the emergence and application of critical political alternatives in the Global South, this book analyses the opportunities and challenges of decolonizing and transforming a modern, hierarchical and globally-immersed nation-state on the basis of indigenous terminologies. Alternative development paradigms that represent values including justice, pluralism, democracy and a sustainable relationship to nature tend to emerge in response to - and often opposed to - the neoliberal globalization. Through a focus on the empirical case of the notion of Vivir Bien ('Living Well') as a critical cultural and ecological paradigm, Ranta demonstrates how indigeneity - indigenous peoples' discourses, cultural ideas and worldviews - has become such a denominator in the construction of local political and policy alternatives. More widely, the author seeks to map conditions for, and the challenges of, radical political projects that aim to counteract neoliberal globalization and Western hegemony in defining development. This book will appeal to critical academic scholars, development practitioners and social activists aiming to come to grips with the complexity of processes of progressive social change in our contemporary global world.

This book draws on the thought of Baudrillard to explore the effects of globalisation and tourism in a Thai context. Arguing that tourism does not necessarily erode local culture but that local culture can in fact be recreated through globalisation and tourism, the author employs studies of the Damnoen Saduk and Pattaya floating markets, showing them to be simulations of Thai culture that undergo changes of form, cultural content and activity, through various stages of representation. With a focus on the themes of the circulation of value and signs, the play of differences and orders of simulacra, this volume examines the extent to which Baudrillard's theory can apply in a non-western context and in relation to tourism. A study of consumption, tourism and the relations between the global and the local, Globalisation, Tourism and Simulacra will appeal to scholars of sociology and geography with interests tourism, globalisation and social theory.

This book explores the transition from the era of internationalization into the era of globalization of Japan by focusing on language and identity as its central themes. By taking an interdisciplinary approach covering education, cultural studies, linguistics and policy-making, the chapters in this book raise certain questions of what constitutes contemporary Japanese culture, Japanese identity and multilingualism and what they mean to local people, including those who do not reside in Japan but are engaged with Japan in some way within the global community. Topics include the role of technology in the spread of Japanese language and culture, hybrid language use in an urban context, the Japanese language as a lingua franca in China, and the identity construction of heritage Japanese language speakers in Australia. The authors do not limit themselves to examining only the Japanese language or the Japanese national/cultural identity, but also explore multilingual practices and multiple/fluid identities in "a transitional Japan." Overall, the book responds to the basic need for better accounts of language and identity of Japan, particularly in the context of increased migration and mobility.

Globalization is changing what citizens need to know and be able to do by interrupting the assumption that the actions of citizens only take place within national borders. If our neighborhoods and nations are affecting and being affected by the world, then our political consciousness must be worldminded. The outcomes of globalization have led educators to rethink what students need to learn and be able to do as citizens in a globally connected world. This volume focuses on research that examines how K-12 teachers and students are currently addressing the challenge of becoming citizens in a globally interconnected world. Although there is an extensive body of literature on citizenship education within national contexts and a growing literature on global education, this volume offers research on the work educators are doing across multiple countries to bring the two fields together to develop global citizens.

"Globalization and the Environment" critically explores the actors, politics and processes that govern the relationship between globalization and the environment. Taking key aspects of globalisation in turn - trade, production and finance - the book highlights the relations of power at work that determine whether globalization is managed in a sustainable way and on whose behalf. Each chapter looks in turn at the political ecology of these central pillars of the global economy, reviewing evidence of its impact on diverse ecologies and societies, its governance - the political structures, institutions and policy making processes in place to manage this relationship - and finally efforts to contest and challenge these prevailing approaches.The book makes sense of the relationship between globalisation and the environment using a range of theoretical tools from different disciplines. This helps to place the debate about the compatibility between globalisation and sustainability in an explicitly political and historical context in which it is possible to appreciate the 'nature' of interests and power relations that privilege some ways of responding to environmental problems over others in a context of globalisation.

The contributors to this volume examine the actual workings and on-the-ground effects of contemporary political economic shifts in the Global South, and implications for reconfiguring social networks, conceptions and practices of governance, and burgeoning social movements. How do various groups in the Global South respond to and manage chronic states of insecurity and precarity concomitant with contemporary globalization processes? While drawing on diverse ethnographic viewpoints in the Philippines, the authors analyze the impact of these processes through the conceptual framework of "emergent sociality," a purported connectedness among individuals fostered through interactions, copresence, and conviviality within a community over a long duration. In so doing, the case studies in this volume suggest, illuminate, and debate insecurities that may be commonly shared among populations in the Philippines and throughout the Global South. This anthology will be of great interest to students and scholars of cultural anthropology, globalization and Philippines society.

In this fully updated and revised new edition, this challenging work further develops a radical theory of the new world order to argue that as the globalization of power intensifies, so too do globalized forms of resistance. Leading political scientist Stephen Gill explains this dialectic of power and resistance involving governance, political economy and civilization with reference to struggles as far-reaching as US supremacy, the power of capital, market civilization, new constitutionalism, neo-liberalism and disciplinary and surveillance power.
Because of increasing inequality, massive social dislocations, cultural conflict and economic crisis associated with disciplinary neo-liberalism and market civilization, challenges from left and right to capitalist globalization have become manifest. The politics of globalization will hinge upon the balance of forces between the old and the new, between dominant and subordinate power and thus with challenges associated with new forms of political agency linked to 'transformative resistance'. In two new chapters, Gill also analyzes the nature of, and struggles over, key legal and constitutional transformations associated with the emerging world order and explores alternative scenarios and social forces to reflect on the new forms of political struggle that will shape global politics for the foreseeable future.
This work is essential reading for all those concerned with globalization, global political economy and international studies.