In this global era, Central Asia must be understood in both geo-economic and geopolitical terms. The region's natural resources compel the attention of rivalrous great powers and ambitious internal factions. The local regimes are caught between the need for international collaborations to valorize these riches and the need to maintain control over them in the interest of state sovereignty. Russia and China dominate the horizon, with other global players close behind; meanwhile, neighboring countries are fractious and unstable with real potential for contagion. This pathbreaking introduction to Central Asia in contemporary international economic and political context answers the needs of both academic and professional audiences and is suitable for course adoption.

To date, most constructivist international relations studies have characterized the influence of transnationalism on domestic forms of activism as uniformly positive. In particular, transnational interactions are viewed as positive factors for the development and daily impact of gender activism. Benjamin Stachursky's book questions the unvarying positive view of transnationalism on domestic forms of activism, arguing for a more nuanced analysis that permits an understanding of the enabling and restricting effects of transnationalism. Stachursky also challenges the dominant view of civil society as normatively homogenous by illustrating the complex relationships and conflicts that exist between NGOs and other civil society representatives. He grounds his theoretical arguments with a comparative case study on women's rights activism in Egypt and Iran, which uses semi-structured interviews with women's rights activists in the two countries and analysis of documentation by local political and societal actors. Looking at the period from the mid-1980s up to present developments such as the Arab Spring, Stachursky analyzes the emergence and development of NGO activism in Egypt and Iran, the social, political, and legal context of NGO activism, and key domestic debates on the impact and legitimacy of the actors operating in women's rights activism. By closely examining the ambivalent relationship between transnationalism and human rights organizations, Stachursky proves that transnationalization has both enabling and constraining effects on the domestic legitimacy of women's rights activists and on their ability to create meaningful social and political change.

This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. The book offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism, citizenship, globalism and multiculturalism to go beyond nationalism often reproduce key aspects of a nationalist imaginary. It argues that the challenge of resisting nationalism will require more than a shift in the scale of politics - from the national up to the global or down to the local, and more than a shift in the count of politics - to an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. In order to avoid the grip of 'nationalist thinking', we need to re-open the question of what it means to imagine community. Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the War in Terror and the new beginning promised by the Presidency of Barack Obama, the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics, even when the aim is to resist nationalism. It claims that a nationalist imaginary includes powerful understandings of freedom, subjectivity, sovereignty and political space/time which must also be placed under question if we want to avoid reproducing ideas about 'us' and 'them'. Drawing on insights from feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as critical approaches to International Relations and Geography, this book presents a unique and refreshing approach to the politics of nationalism.

This book examines the explicit effects of global connectivity on local culture and society in post-reform mainland China. It focuses on individual level globalization in China and how global socialization impacts local residents behaviors, lifestyle, value orientation and the consequence of local transformation. Asking questions such as:

• What types of individual global connections have emerged and developed in China over the last three decades?
• What aspects of local transformations are influenced by such global connections?
• How does the impact of global connections vary across different aspects of local communities and institutions?

Jiaming Sun uses an original micro-level relational approach to analyse how different types of individual global connections may make a difference and constitute certain outcomes of local transformation, the outcome being that global connections are capable of facilitating local transformation across different spatial, economic, and cultural settings.

Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice will show students and scholars what it means in practice to talk about building transnational justice - both on the side of economic regulation and on the side of human rights and humanitarian law. It links national and transnational processes, tracing the activities of lawyers with their successful and less successful strategies to build institutions and credibility for a transnational legal field. Examples include developments in international criminal justice, including the unsuccessful quest to establish universal jurisdiction for the prosecution of human rights violators; the very successful efforts to build transnational trade and intellectual property regimes; and the relative success in building a European legal field. The introductory and concluding chapters by the co-editors, drawing on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, link the chapters together and explore the possibilities for a more institutionalized and unified transnational legal field - bridging the economic and corporate side with the human rights and humanitarian side.Addressing a range of international issues, Lawyers and the Construction of Transnational Justice is a major contribution to the field of sociology of law, as well as to debates about global governance.

How do political ideologies and urban landscapes intersect in the context of globalization? This volume illuminates the production of ideologies as both discursive and spatial phenomena in distinct contributions that ground their analysis in cities of the Global North and South. From Sydney to Singapore, Hong Kong to Hanoi, Las Vegas to Macau, conventional public spaces are in decline as sites of ideological dissent. Instead, we are witnessing the colonisation of urban space by market globalism (today's dominant global ideology) and securitised surveillance regimes. Against this backdrop, how should we interpret the proliferation of metaphors that claim to communicate the essence of global transformation? In what ways do space and language work together to normalise the truth claims of powerful ideological players? What kinds of social forces mobilise to contest the cooptation of language and space and to pose alternative local and global futures? This volume poses these questions against the collapse of old geographical scales and cartographic techniques for identifying the contours of civil society. The city acts as an entry point to a new spatial analytics of contemporary ideological forces. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Critical research and theorizing on the Anti- or Alter-Globalization Movement has exploded over the last two decades. This volume provides a platform for scholar-activists themselves to share insights from engaged research and to critically reflect on movement histories and internal dynamics. It also highlights ways in which activists are reaching beyond their geographical and issue boundaries to link with others in struggle, to construct a broader global movement of the left--and beyond. Case studies span the social movement spectrum from more traditional concerns with class, the primacy of the labor movement, economic redistribution and justice, through the so-called 'new' movements of identity and post-materialist issues of peace, the environment, gender, and indigenous struggles, to the newest currents in (post-)autonomy, (post-)anarchism, and de- or anti-coloniality. Together these studies show that what began in Chiapas with the Zapatista cry of basta ya! as an 'anti-globalization' movement morphed for a time into 'alter-globalization' and 'global peace and justice', and may now be emerging as a counter-hegemonic project of and for global democratization. This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.

Fifty Key Thinkers on Globalization is an outstanding guide to often-encountered thinkers whose ideas have shaped, defined and influenced this new and rapidly growing field. The authors clearly and lucidly survey the life, work and impact of fifty of the most important theorists of globalization including: Manuel Castells Joseph Stiglitz David Held Jan Aart Scholte Each thinker's contribution to the field is evaluated and assessed, and each entry includes a helpful guide to further reading. Fully cross-referenced throughout, this remarkable reference guide is essential reading for students of politics and international relations, economics, sociology, history, anthropology and literary studies.

This volume analyses the impact of globalization on civil service systems across the Middle East and North Africa. A collaboration between practitioners and academic public policy experts, it presents an analytical model to assess how globalization influences civil servants, illustrated by case studies of countries where there have been increased engagement with international actors. It demonstrates how this increased interaction has altered the position of civil servants and traces the shifting patterns of power and accountability between civil servants, politicians and other actors. It is an original and important addition to the debate about globalization's role in transnational public administration and governance.

There is no doubt that globalisation has profound effects on crime, justice and our feelings of security, identity and belonging. Many of these affect both the making of laws and the breaking of laws. It has been argued however that criminology has been too provincial, focusing as it often does on national laws and issues, whilst others have said that globalisation is the stuff of international relations, global finance and trade, not of criminology. This book disputes this by asserting that criminology has a firm place in this arena and globalisation offers the discipline a challenge that it should relish. Some of the field's top scholars from the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand consider these challenges and present cutting-edge analysis and debate. Topics covered include transnational organised crime, international policing and a range of other issues involving global harm such as genocide, the workings of international financial institutions, the fate of international migrants and the impact of anti-immigration sentiments in Europe. A particular focus is on borders and arrangements that deal with migration and populations that are excluded and adrift. This book highlights criminology's analysis and engagement in new understandings of globalisation, in particular its harmful and unethical manifestations, and offers a mode of scrutiny and vigilance. Globalisation and the Challenge to Criminology will be of particular interest to those studying criminology, criminal justice, policing, security and international relations as well as those who seek to understand globalisation and, in particular, its harmful outcomes.

This volume of Culture and Civilization focuses on cosmopolitanism, the global polity, and political ramifications of globalization. The introduction by Gabriel R. Ricci establishes context and provides an overview of the entire work. Topics include the history of globalization, climate change policy, ecological consequences of development, concepts of civilization, human rights, Eastern thought and economics, global citizenship, and travel writing.

Within this collection, Carl J. Strikwerda argues that the first era of globalization in modern times was marked by global migrations patterns. Pablo Iannone's history of the Andean oil rush and its ecological consequences looks at the processes of development. Brett Bowden argues that civilization entails both progress and war. J. Baird Callicott provides a philosophical analysis of a moral theory that accommodates spatial and temporal scales of climate change, Sanjay Paul analyzes the United Nations Global Compact, and Ed Chung discusses the role of economic theory in business schools. Colin Butler reflects on E. F. Schumacher's "Buddhist Economics," while Taso Lagos relates parallel polis to the idea of global citizenship. Tony Burns examines the ways in which Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant have been interpreted. Finally, Adam Stauffer explores Charles Warren Stoddard's work South-Sea Idyls.

This volume of Culture and Civilization, the first under Ricci's editorship, follows the tradition of the previous four volumes--developing critical ideas intended to produce a positive intellectual climate, one that is prepared to confront challenges and alert us to the opportunities, for people in all fields and of all faiths, of the twenty-first century.

This book explores the limits of NGO influence and the conditions that constrain NGOs when they participate in international negotiations Through an empirically rich study of the UN World Summits on the Information Society (WSIS) this book conceptualizes structural power mechanisms that shape global ICT governance and analyses the impact of NGOs on communication rights, intellectual property rights, financing, and Internet governance. The institutional framework of UN negotiations makes it easy for states to exclude NGOs from crucial meetings and to neglect their most relevant demands, in part explaining why NGOs had only limited influence on the policy outcomes of the WSIS in Geneva 2003 and Tunis 2005, although high numbers of NGOs participated. Using a critical perspective, Dany demonstrates that despite the far-reaching participation rights for civil society actors, structural power mechanisms continued to limit the influence of participating NGOs and this contradicts the widely held assumption that extensive NGO participation necessarily increases NGO influence on the policy outcomes. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, global governance, the United Nations, and global information and communication politics.

This book is designed to reflect both our current knowledge regarding sport, globalisation and "encounters" with several important "post-colonial" or non-western societies and to draw together scholars from a range of different disciplines. Case studies of cultural encounters in Central, South-East Asia, Asia Minor and the Arabian peninsula capture the paradoxical processes of emulation, resistance and transformation that are at work in the diffusion and development of "sport" and body cultures. These case studies bring together insights from anthropology, cultural studies, geography, history, law, sociology, various area and post-colonial studies.

The whirlwind of financial globalization has descended upon emerging market economies and rapid change has brought both benefits and problems upon a dynamic group of nations. This book examines the impact of ever increasing financial globalization on emerging market economies, both in the former communist countries of Eastern Europe and the developing world in general. This impressive volume covers themes and issues such as: *global capital flows and financial liberalization *global financial architecture *financial and macroeconomic instability Financial Globalization and the Emerging Market Economies will be of interest to students and academics in many areas including international economics, international finance and international political economy. It will also provide a useful source of information for those who work in the financial industry at large.

Decentralization is accepted as one of the defining features of the third wave of democratic transitions in Latin America and commonly understood as an index and an agent of democratization. This rather optimistic perspective is inherent in the literature which is dominated by two theories. The liberal-individualist approach, especially as advocated by the World Bank, promotes decentralization policies on the premise of their efficiency, equity, and responsiveness to local demands. Similarly, the statist approach claims that decentralization can be the route to greater accountability, transparency and participation in governance; they add that this path should be guided by political elites and institutions. These dominant views nevertheless understate the extent to which certain decentralization policies have been implemented in lockstep with neoliberalization. This book examines the relationship between global economic processes and decentralization. It argues that through decentralization policies, the imperatives of neoliberal rules of competitiveness have been diffused into local governments and economies, generating different local development models. Whether decentralization produces democratic opening at the local level is contingent on how the local economy is integrated into global economic processes, and which social and economic groups are empowered, and disempowered, in that transition.

The process of globalization has brought about countless changes in societies, communities, regions and economies across the globe. It has been analyzed from many perspectives as a result and much has been written to muddy the waters of our understanding of this important concept. In going back to the real origins of the global economy, this book demonstrates that understanding this phenomenon as a, 'battle against time' will bring a new clarity to the subject.

The process of globalization was accompanied by the mastering of social time, thereby producing a progressive increase in the speed of business transactions, both in manufacturing and in services. The context is the development of international trade in western societies and the creation of business institutions to drive forward growth. The account takes a long view, beginning with early European exploration in the B.C. period, and ending with the establishment of multinational enterprises in the 20th century.

Using an impressive range of sources this unique book will be valuable reading for students and academics involved with the study of international business, economic history, business history and politics, among other disciplines.

This book situates the evolution of capitalist economies along Asia's Pacific Rim after the Second World War within broader global, political and economic changes. Specifically, it charts their growth at the interface of periodic crises and successive waves of restructuring, and links changes in the world economy to shifts in regional dynamics in east and southeast Asia. It suggests that while the expansion of Japanese corporate networks was crucial to the emergence of the region as a low-cost exporter to the world, the reintegration of China into the world market will free the region from its dependence on the US as a market of last resort.

Amateurs without Borders examines the rise of new actors in the international development world: volunteer-driven grassroots international nongovernmental organizations. These small aid organizations, now ten thousand strong, sidestep the world of professionalized development aid by launching projects built around personal relationships and the skills of volunteers. This book draws on fieldwork in the United States and Africa, web data, and IRS records to offer the first large-scale systematic study of these groups. Amateurs without Borders investigates the aspirations and limits of personal compassion on a global scale.

In the 19th century, colonial rule brought the modern world closer to the Indonesian peoples, introducing mechanized transport, all-weather roads, postal and telegraph communications, and steamship networks that linked Indonesia's islands to each other, to Europe and the Middle East. This book looks at Indonesia's global importance, and traces the entwining of its peoples and economies with the wider world.

The book discusses how products unique to Indonesia first slipped into regional trade networks and exposed scattered communities to the dynamic influence of far-off civilizations. It focuses on economic and cultural changes that resulted in the emergence of political units organized as oligarchies or monarchies, and goes on to look in detail at Indonesia's relationship with Holland's East Indies Company.

The book analyses the attempts by politicians to negotiate ways of being modern but uniquely Indonesian, and considers the oscillations in Indonesia between movements for theocracy and democracy. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of World History and Southeast Asian Studies.

Despite prognostications of the "end of history," the 21st century has posed new challenges and a host of global crises. This book takes up the current global economic crisis in relation to new and changing dynamics of territory, authority, and rights in today's global system. The authors explore long simmering conflicts in comparative perspective, including settler colonialism in South Africa, Northern Ireland and Israel/Palestine. They discuss indigenous struggles against environmental land grabs and related destruction of indigenous lands by the US nuclear weapons complex. The book uniquely considers the sacred in the context of the global system, including struggles of Latina/o farm workers in the U.S. for social justice and for change in the Catholic Church. Other chapters examine questions of civilizations and identity in the contemporary global system, as well as the role of world-regions.

Significant historical and geographical differences account for the many processes and trajectories of regional development in East Asia. These historical and geographical specificities in East Asia have prompted serious re-examination of existing theories in regional development, and in particular the "new regionalism" approach associated with such ideas as the learning region, institutional thickness, relational assets, and regional innovation system. This book brings together a group of leading researchers specializing in local and regional development in East Asian economies. Through in-depth empirical studies of specific regions and localities, these authors offer fresh and innovative perspectives on how regions evolve and develop over time in the world's most dynamic macro-regional economy. In particular, their work points to the critical importance of local and trans-local processes in shaping regional development trajectories. The book is timely given that the debate on the nature and dynamics of regional development in both academic and policy circles has now moved on. From the earlier focus on endogenous regional assets (such as localized networks of association and trust), scholars and policymakers are now analyzing the complex relationship between economic globalization and regional change. This high calibre collection makes a significant contribution to the literature on local and regional development in Asia and provides an important resource for researchers, students, and policy makers interested in East Asia. This book was published as a special issue of Regional Studies.

Managing expatriates and other 'traditional' internationally mobile workers is a significant part of many academic programmes and the focus of some specialist ones. But we cannot answer the big questions about working internationally if we exclude from our teaching people who do not fit into our usual conceptions and assumptions about who it is that organisations employ. Written by two of the most frequently published authors in the field, this is the only textbook to specialise in all the widely-accepted types of international work such as high-status expatriation, international business travel, short-term project work, and international commuting, while also covering the management of low-status expatriates, qualified immigrants, economic and low-skilled migrants, and refugees. Topics include cost effective global HRM, value and return on investment, localisation, home- and host-based compensation, talent management, human rights, safety and security, and duty of care - all examined from the differing perspectives of organisational practitioners and international workers and their families. In nine clear chapters, this book covers everything that a teacher or student of expatriation and global mobility needs to know, with each chapter written specifically as a primer for teaching sessions. Chapters are research-led and data driven, outlining current research on the topic. Included for each chapter are learning objectives, chapter summaries, key theories, detailed reference lists, additional reading lists, high-quality diagrams and tables, class activities, and reflective questions suitable for exam preparation. Supplemented with consulting reports and surveys that are highly applicable to (working) MBA students, this is the ideal textbook for any contemporary course in expatriate management or international HRM needing to take it to the next level.

This book places the lens on postcolonial agency and resistance in a social and geopolitical context that has witnessed great transformations in international politics. What does postcolonial politics mean in a late modern context of interventions that seek to govern postcolonial populations? Drawing on historic and contemporary articulations of agency and resistance and highlighting voices from the postcolonial world, the book explores the transition from colonial modernity to the late modern postcolonial era. It shows that at each moment wherein the claim to politics is made, the postcolonial subject comes face to face with global operations of power that seek to control and govern. As seen in the Middle East and elsewhere, these operations have variously drawn on war, policing, as well as pedagogical practices geared at governing the political aspirations of target societies. The book provides a conceptualisation of postcolonial political subjectivity, discusses moments of its emergence, and exposes the security agendas that seek to govern it.

Engaging with political thought, from Hannah Arendt, to Frantz Fanon, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, among other critical and postcolonial theorists, and drawing on art, literature, and film from the postcolonial world, this work will be of great interest to students and scholars of critical international relations, postcolonial theory, and political theory.

This book explores how the World Social Forum (WSF) has developed in response to the current period of profound crisis and transition in the history of Western capitalist modernity. The WSF has been thrown up by social forces as a laboratory of practices for other possible worlds; it is at a leading edge of the transition, where other possible futures are being imagined and constructed, but it is also firmly rooted in the order that is passing. Based on ten years of field work on three continents, this book examines social movements as knowledge producers. It pays attention to specific movements and their praxis-based knowledges and its arguments are grounded in sustained empirical attention to what movements are doing and saying on the terrain of the WSF over time and from place to place. Engaging with several strands of social and political thought, global civil society, autonomism, and transnational feminism, each chapter outlines a set of contestations and contributions with relevance beyond debates about the WSF.It will be of strong interest to students and scholars of social movement studies; international politics; gender studies; sociology; political theory and social work.

International development is a vibrant, interdisciplinary area of the social sciences. This Short Guide offers a uniquely succinct and balanced account of this politically charged subject. It distils both the classic and newer debates together in a clear framework and illustrates them with contemporary examples. Designed to introduce a wide readership to international development, the book: * considers how far the field has been reconfigured over time and to what extent it is likely to change in the future; * reviews contemporary topics including tourism, migration and digital technologies; * includes distinctive international case studies and examples. By providing a succinct evaluation of competing approaches to, and perspectives on, the idea and practice of international development, this book offers students across the social sciences a distinct and invaluable introduction to the field.