Constructing the Global Imaginary

Author(s):  
Heather A. Meyer
Keyword(s):  
2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-3) ◽  
pp. 193-207 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amentahru Wahlrab

This article interprets the globalization of nonviolence and nonviolent resistance through the lens of Manfred B. Steger’s concept of the “global imaginary.” It argues that the globalization of nonviolence and the global imaginary are mutually reinforcing processes. Nonviolent protests are driven by local issues and are, thus, context specific and local but, as in the case of the Arab uprisings, as they spread through themenaand beyond, the uprisings provided historically linked examples of a growing global consciousness, a “global” we.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 185-215
Author(s):  
DIETER PLEHWE ◽  
QUINN SLOBODIAN

This article bridges the gap between the intellectual history and critical geography of neoliberalism through a study of the overlooked figure of the German economist Herbert Giersch. As a public economist and director of the Kiel Institute for the World Economy from 1969 to 1989, Giersch blended German traditions of location theory with liberal globalism to lay the foundation of a neoliberal economic geography. We show the origins of globalism at Kiel through the work of the institute's founder, Bernhard Harms, and Giersch's influences, including Johann Heinrich von Thünen, August Lösch, and Alfred Weber. We argue that Giersch's neoliberal economic geography emerged out of two perceived necessities in the 1970s. On the one hand, he saw a need to reorient German industry through import competition with the global South. On the other hand, he felt the need for an ethically defensible global imaginary to pose against both traditional German social democracy and the promise of the global South's New International Economic Order. In his metaphor of a landscape of so-called Schumpeterian volcanoes in which regions were locked in perpetual struggle for temporary monopoly positions against competitors, Giersch provided a powerful distillation of the geographic imaginary at the heart of the neoliberal movement since the 1970s.


Author(s):  
Alexander D. Barder

Global Race War: International Politics and Racial Hierarchy explores the historical connections between race and violence from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. Barder shows how beginning with the Haitian Revolution and nineteenth century settler colonialism the development of the very idea of global order was based on racial hierarchy. The intensification of racial violence happened when the global racial hierarchy appeared to be in crisis. By the first half of the twentieth century, ideas about race war come to fuse themselves with state genocidal projects to eliminate internal and external enemy races. Global processes of racialization did not end with the Second World War and with the discrediting of scientific racism, the decolonization of the global South and the expansion of the state-system to newly independent states; rather it continued in different forms as the racialization of cultural or civilizational attributes that then resulted in further racial violence. From fears about the “Yellow Peril,” the “Clash of Civilization,” or, more recently, the “Great Replacement,” the global imaginary is constituted by ideas about racial difference. Examining global politics in terms of race and racial violence reveals a different spatial topology across domestic and global politics. Global histories of racial hierarchy and violence have important implications for understanding the continued salience of race within Western polities. The book revisits two centuries of international history to show the important consequences of a global racial imaginary that continues to reverberate across time and space.


2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 21-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marysia Galbraith

The paper explores ways in which individuals make use of the opportunities and resources provided by the European Union (EU), and how such instrumentalities can make the concept of Europe more salient for citizens. This is important to European Union studies generally because careful observation and analysis of everyday engagements can help to reveal the basis upon which the EU gains legitimacy, or, alternatively, the grounds for resistance to further integration. Through an examination of Poles' experiences of mobility, and their reflections about crossing national borders to work and travel, the paper shows that instrumentality is not just motivated by economic interests, but also by the desire to advance culturally, socially and symbolically within a global imaginary of hierarchically ranked nations. As such, support for European integration tends to weaken in situations where ongoing inequalities and exclusions lead to perceptions of social demotion. Further, instrumentalities can deepen meaningful engagement with the EU in ways that also reassert national loyalties.


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