scholarly journals The Rising Powers and Globalization: Structural Change to the Global System Between 1965 and 2005

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 373-403 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lindsay Marie Jacobs ◽  
Ronan Van Rossem

This article sets out to critically assess the increasingly prevalent claims of rapidly changing global power relations under influence of the ‘rising powers’ and ‘globalization’. Our main contention is that current analyses of countries’ degree of global power (especially for the BRICS) has been dominated by the control over resources approach that, though gauging power potential, insufficiently takes into account how this potential is converted into actual global might. By drawing on a unique and extensive dataset comprising of a wide array of political, economic and military networks for a vast number of countries between 1965 and 2005, we aim to 1) reassess alleged changes in the structure of the world-system since 1965 and 2) to analyze whether these changes can be attributed to ‘globalization’. Significant attention is paid to the trajectories of the BRICS and to the possibly divergent structural evolutions of the political and economic dimensions that constitute the system. Our results show that despite a certain degree of power convergence between countries at the sub-top of the system, overall, divergence continues to take place between the most and least powerful, and stratification is reproduced. Globalization is further shown to exacerbate this trend, though its effect differs on the political and economic dimensions of the system. Overall, though the traditional ‘core powers’ might have to share their power with newcomer China in the future, this hardly heralds a new age in which the global system of power relations are converging to the extent that stratification is being undermined.

2018 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 186
Author(s):  
Myles Carroll

This article considers the role played by discourses of nature in structuring the cultural politics of anti-GMO activism. It argues that such discourses have been successful rhetorical tools for activists because they mobilize widely resonant nature-culture dualisms that separate the natural and human worlds. However, these discourses hold dubious political implications. In valorizing the natural as a source of essential truth, natural purity discourses fail to challenge how naturalizations have been used to legitimize sexist, racist and colonial systems of injustice and oppression. Rather, they revitalize the discursive purchase of appeals to nature as a justification for the status quo, indirectly reinforcing existing power relations. Moreover, these discourses fail to challenge the critical though contingent reality of GMOs' location within the wider framework of neoliberal social relations. Fortunately, appeals to natural purity have not been the only effective strategy for opposing GMOs. Activist campaigns that directly target the political economic implications of GMOs within the context of neoliberalism have also had successes without resorting to appeals to the purity of nature. The successes of these campaigns suggest that while nature-culture dualisms remain politically effective normative groundings, concerns over equity, farmers' rights, and democracy retain potential as ideological terrains in the struggle for social justice.


Aula Palma ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 211-234
Author(s):  
Carlos Alberto Pérez Garay

ResumenEl presente trabajo de investigación describe y analiza la vasta correspondencia que tuvo el escritor limeño con diversos personajes del ámbito político, económico, social y cultural del Perú y del mundo, pertenecientes a la Colección Ricardo Palma de la Biblioteca Nacional delPerú.Palabras Claves: Ricardo Palma, Correspondencia, Biblioteca Nacional AbstractThis research paper describes and analyzes the vast correspondence that the Lima writer had with various characters from the political, economic, social and cultural spheres of Peru and the world, belonging to the Ricardo Palma Collection of the National Library of Peru.Keywords: Ricardo Palma, Correspondence, National Library


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lea Rahman

Climate change is not just one of the main problems of this century, it rather is a matter of justice: It was particularly caused by western industrialized countries and now hits all states bit by bit – regardless of the question of guilt. The author studies how states struggle for solutions and binding rules at the annual Climate Change conferences and which of the proposals have prevailed. Using approaches of the postcolonial theory, she examines which power relations that are tracing back to colonialism still exist at the political, economic and epistemic level.


2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 23
Author(s):  
Yixiao Guo

This research paper analyses the main purposes the Beijing subway system, which served from 1969 to now as a tool of political defense as well as a transportation system. The notion to construct the system arose in 1953, but the first section of today’s Line 1 did not open until September 1969.  Today, the Beijing subway system is the world’s busiest in terms of annual ridership and the world’s second longest subway system, ranking only behind Shanghai’s. (Xinhua News Agency, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2017-12/30/c_1122188643.htm.) The political and economic development and trends in China in the second half of 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, such as the Cultural Revolution and the 2008 Olympics, affected the subway system’s development greatly. This paper examines Chinese documents with the aim of providing a general understanding of the development and purpose of the Beijing system, through political, economic and technical analysis, among others, of its history. There exists almost no document, ¬¬either in English or Chinese, that analyzes the development of Beijing’s subway system. However, this topic should be considered important, as it provides an alternative way of viewing the development of China and its governing principles throughout its late-20th century and current-day history.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-620
Author(s):  
Regenia Gagnier

The conditions of rapid change and modernization that swept the world from the second half of the nineteenth century enforced the new nationalisms, imperialisms, racisms, anti-Semitisms, and, more positively, sexualities that are again sweeping the world today. The longue durée of modern globalization that began with British industrialization continues with our contemporary forms of technological expansion, international competition, populist disaffection, and accompanying forms of stress, anxiety, depression, nostalgia, regression: decadence. This essay will focus on the political-economic conditions of the period and the cosmopolitanism and progressivism that resisted, and continue to resist, them. I conclude with the classic Japanese analysis of the condition, Kobayashi Hideo's “Literature of the Lost Home” (1933).


2010 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-75
Author(s):  
Seemi Waheed

The geo-strategic location of a country gives it advantage or disadvantage in its relation with the comity of nations and addressing its domestic challenges. The vision, acumen and capacity of political leadership, however, determine the maximisation of advantages from geo-strategic location in attaining the national interests. Interplay of domestic political power, geo-strategic location and global power dynamics are aptly reflected in the political history of Pakistan as narrated in “Between Dreams and Realities”. “Between Dreams and Realities” is both an autobiography and dispassionate account of Pakistan’s chequered history as the author puts it “watched the political drama as ring side observer.” The author was actively engaged in roles, confronting formidable challenges to improve policy coordination and implementation. A sequenced political, economic, and foreign relations history of Pakistan is described illustrating turning points, milestones, and debacles in her existence as a country. The political scenario of Pakistan, marred by intermittent military takeovers, with disregard, and mutilation of the constitution, mainly served personal interests. The rulers, irrespective of whether elected or otherwise, conjoined survival of their rule with that of the country. Thereupon, usurpation of power is legitimised by engineered elections or putting in place pliable judiciary. The indiscipline in political parties, absence of vision, political inexperience, self-centered, and headlong political leaders, increased the vulnerability of parliament to complete its tenure. Weak organisation of political parties is, thus easily maneuverable to the wheeling, dealings, and gaming of ‘establishment’. This is amply visible in all military takeovers of elected governments, right from throwing of Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto’s government to dissolution of Nawaz Sharif’s government in 1999.


2019 ◽  
pp. 171-195
Author(s):  
Ahmed Youssry ◽  
Brett Winklehake ◽  
Jaime A. Lobera

Developing countries around the world strive to implement one of the several current models of microfinance. This study focuses on two models: Grameen Bank, which is considered the change factor for the microfinance field, and Kiva.org, an organization that understood the importance of the Internet and crowdfunding to create a different model of microfinance. The purpose of the study is to analyze these two models and determine which would be more suitable for application in Egypt. This study provides a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT analysis), a financial analysis, and a structural analysis, as well as historical background for both organizations along with a scan for the political, economic, social, and technological infrastructure in Egypt to determine the most suitable microfinance model.


Author(s):  
David Harvey

Imperialism is a word that trips easily off the tongue. But it has such different meanings that it is difficult to use it without clarification as an analytic rather than a polemical term. I here define that special brand of it called ‘capitalist imperialism’ as a contradictory fusion of ‘the politics of state and empire’ (imperialism as a distinctively political project on the part of actors whose power is based in command of a territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources towards political, economic, and military ends) and ‘the molecular processes of capital accumulation in space and time’ (imperialism as a diffuse political-economic process in space and time in which command over and use of capital takes primacy). With the former I want to stress the political, diplomatic, and military strategies invoked and used by a state (or some collection of states operating as a political power bloc) as it struggles to assert its interests and achieve its goals in the world at large. With the latter, I focus on the ways in which economic power flows across and through continuous space, towards or away from territorial entities (such as states or regional power blocs) through the daily practices of production, trade, commerce, capital flows, money transfers, labour migration, technology transfer, currency speculation, flows of information, cultural impulses, and the like. What Arrighi refers to as the ‘territorial’ and the ‘capitalist’ logics of power are rather different from each other. To begin with, the motivations and interests of agents differ. The capitalist holding money capital will wish to put it wherever profits can be had, and typically seeks to accumulate more capital. Politicians and statesmen typically seek outcomes that sustain or augment the power of their own state vis-à-vis other states. The capitalist seeks individual advantage and (though usually constrained by law) is responsible to no one other than his or her immediate social circle, while the statesman seeks a collective advantage and is constrained by the political and military situation of the state and is in some sense or other responsible to a citizenry or, more often, to an elite group, a class, a kinship structure, or some other social group.


Author(s):  
Ana María Carrillo

This chapter deals with the development and production of vaccines in Mexico from the last third of the nineteenth century to 1989, when the erosion of this sector began. Along with discussing Mexican’s physicians’ reception of discoveries in microbiology and immunology, it points out the existence of a network of relationships between Mexican institutions and others around the world. The chapter shows that vaccine development and production did not follow a constant ascendant path, but that it also suffered declines and regressions. It describes the field’s achievements and limitations, and reveals its relationships with the political, economic, and social conditions of the country in different historical moments. Finally, it evaluates the importance of attaining national self-sufficiency in vaccine development and production for the building of the state in pre- and post-revolutionary Mexico, and seeks to provide some answers to the questions of how and why the erosion of this strategic field occurred.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 154-171 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beatriz Tomé-Alonso ◽  
Lucía Ferreiro Prado

Abstract While fiction and non-fiction productions can be used as tools to observe, describe, and analyze the “world-out-there,” within these events-issues centered approaches post-positivists posit films themselves as “cultural artifacts” to be analyzed. This paper proposes a critical analysis of Waltz with Bashir (2008) to be conducted with students in the classroom. This acclaimed animated film by Israeli writer and director Ari Folman depicting the 1982 Lebanon War is a non-obvious but germane example of Said's “Orientalism.” After explaining post-structuralism and post-orientalist stances on subjectivity, power relations, and the political consequences of the narratives we create, we analyze the film by applying an orientalist grid to Waltz with Bashir and raising qualitative questions to foster the student's criticality. We conclude by examining student's reactions to the film and their understanding of “Orientalism.”


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