Globalization and Those that Resist It

DEVS 201

Winter 2013

Global Disparity

Two faces of Globalization

• “The face of unprecedented prosperity for a minority of the world’s investors and consumers” concentrated mostly in the Global North; and,

• “The face of poverty, displacement, job and food insecurity, health crises (AIDS), and a widening band of informal activity (over 1 billion slum-dwellers) as people make do in lieu of stable jobs,

government supports, and sustainable habitats,” mostly concentrated in the global south. (McMichael, 2008, p. 192)

What Frames globalization?

• Elements of Globalization Project– Economic

• primacy of markets, deregulation and globalization of labour – global governance institutions to enforce this

– Socio-Cultural, • Globalizing and commodifying social and cultural (re)production

– Environmental» climate change, deforestation, depeasantization – short

term profit over long-term implications

How is globalization practiced

How is Globalization Resisted => Countermovements

• Fundamentalisms– Articulate the legitimacy deficit of development and

globalization – Often take the form of ethnonationalist resurgence – Often in eye of beholder, but have roots in modernity

• Environmentalisms– Range from sustainable dev’t to resistance movements

– Face challenge of providing energy alternative and top-down planning alternative

– Also have to contend with appropriation of message

Countermovements, continued

• Feminism– Range from Women in Dev’t (WID), to Gender and Dev’t (GAD), to

women and the Environment, to Women, Poverty and Fertility, to Women’s Rights

– Three key threads: valuing equality in work; valuing social reproduction; reorienting values from economism to humanism

– How do women’s rights get institutionalized?

• Cosmopolitan Activism» Brings together many strands of activism that “value diversity as

a universal right” (p. 260)

» Interested in redefining what democracy means

» Examples: Zapatistas, Alternative globalization movements & Occupy movements

Countermovements, continued

• Food Sovereignty/local food Movements– Response to global food trade/attack on farming– Incorporates revitalization of democracy and education in

assertion of farming rights– Offers alternative production process and way of life

Implications of Globalization on Local Communities

• Examples from class:– Inuit example of climate change on way of life

• Community least responsible may be forced to move - adapt• Climate change a result of development, but also needs to be

addressed globally• Need to recognize local/indigenous knowledge

– China Blue/Life and Debt/When Silence is Golden video– International outsourcing/informalization of production

– Implications for this in pitting community against community

– Seeing how global capital impacts local communities

What are communities doing?

• Building social movements that contest this reality in different ways, and also speak alternatives:– Fundamentalism, environmentalism, feminism,

cosmopolitan activism, food sovereignty

• Looking for ways to put off dealing with it• Also looking for ways to adapt and or mitigate its

impact

»Important to remember Polanyi double movement, with the rise of the “crisis of globalization”