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 slumdwellers) 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
• Poverty Governance
– Structurally using poverty to deregulate
• Outsourcing
– Involves turning the globe into a labour reserve
• Displacement
– Involves the massive shifting of people either to make way for market
needs, or to respond to them
• Informalization
– With less labour stability comes larger groups who live on the
edge of global market
» Recolonization
» Resources needed for the market are sectioned off
and recolonized to ensure their availability
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”