Globalization and Those that Resist It

1. Globalization and Those that Resist It DEVS 201 Winter 2013

2. Global Disparity

3. 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)

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. 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”