Contesting Global Order: Development, Global Governance, and Globalization by James H. Mittelman

Author:James H. Mittelman [Mittelman, James H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Development, Intergovernmental Organizations, Globalization, Political Economy, Economic Development, Political Science, Business & Economics, General
ISBN: 9781136865077
Google: JPPIud3PCiIC
Goodreads: 17581930
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

The components of critical globalization studies

Building on the foregoing, a robust conceptualization of critical globalization studies would include the following complex of interacting components.

1. Reflexivity is an awareness of the relationship between knowledge and specific material and political conditions. To be reflexive is to probe historical beginnings and interests underpinning, or embedded in, a perspective or theory (Cox 1986). A critical conceptualization of globalization warrants a searching consciousness of a series of transformations that constitute this set of processes.

2. Historicism incorporates the time dimension in globalization studies (Cox 2002). It corrects the ahistorical approaches to globalization. For example, the common sense notion that globalization is an inevitable force presupposes that it is a timeless essence without a beginning and an end. Rather, proceeding from definite historical locations, globalization is a distinctive configuration, with its own social power relations, and whose future is open ended. Thus, it is wrong either to engage in only presentism, or to collapse globalization into the vicissitudes of all world history. If globalization is historically constructed, then critical globalization studies requires rigorous historical thinking.

3. Decentering involves myriad perspectives on globalization from both its epicenters and the margins. Inasmuch as most globalization studies are produced in the West, local knowledge elsewhere has the potential to generate distinctive discourses—on, say, Islamic globalization—and fresh questions. Indeed, aerial views of globalization require grounding. With its own specificity and contingencies, Africa offers a particularly auspicious standpoint for entering the intricate dialectics of globalization and marginalization. This lens provides peripheral vision in that it enables the critic to see globalization from the outside in.

4. Crossovers between the social sciences and complementary branches of knowledge are key to a critical understanding of globalization. Two types of crossover are most pertinent: to other strands of critical theory, such as critical legal studies and critical cartography, and to real-world problems, understood in a holistic manner. For example, to come to grips with the global HIV-AIDS pandemic and severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), and the obstacles to mitigating these diseases, one must break disciplinary barriers. This entails a combination of medical, social, cultural, economic, and political research. Similarly, ecological renewal requires bridging social inquiry, humanistic studies, and the natural sciences.

5. Strategic transformations are about establishing counterhegemony: how to engage hegemonic power, upend it, and offer an emancipatory vision.3 The goal is to inculcate a new moral order in lieu of the dominant ethics—currently, an ethos of efficiency, competition, individualism, and consumption inscribed in neoliberalism. At issue, among other objectives, is democratic globalization, including accountability and self-determination. The means would be countervailing power. At the end of the day, transformative action must have practical purposes.

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