The Puzzle of Twenty-First-Century Globalization explores the opportunities and challenges of our international economic system. Patrice Franko and Stephen Stamos clearly trace how the ways we produce, finance, and trade goods and services are profoundly shaped by technologies of communication, transportation, and trade. Globalization encourages hyper-specialization—lavishly rewarding those with the skill sets to serve the global marketplace and punishing those poorly positioned to compete. Globalized systems have created great prosperity—along with instability, vulnerability, and backlash. Few genuinely understand the complex underpinnings of our international economic system—and these specialists tend to operate in isolated silos of finance, trade, and production. But without appreciating how systems come together, we cannot explain political reactions against the costs of globalization such as the Brexit vote or the rise of Donald Trump. We don’t value the changing geo-economic importance of the developing world nor the deep threat to ecosystems. This book is the first to emphasize the interrelated economic aspects of globalization from an interdisciplinary perspective. By placing an introduction to trade, finance, and multinational production in the same text that discusses the changing role of developing countries and the challenges to the environment, the authors provide the novice with the basics to understand the global economy while also challenging advanced students to appreciate global connectivity. Closing the knowledge gap in international economics, the authors present the historical context, interdisciplinary grounding, and competing political perspectivesneededto encourage sound critical thinking around contemporary globalization. They provide the essential global economic tools to equip all readers to make decisions that may foster a fairer, more sustainable global system.
Poverty, inequality, and dispossession accompany economic globalization. Bringing together three international law scholars, this book addresses how international law and its regimes of trade, investment, finance, as well as human rights, are implicated in the construction of misery, and how international law is producing, reproducing, and embedding injustice and narrowing the alternatives that might really serve humanity. Adopting a pluralist approach, the authors confront the unconscionable dimensions of the global economic order, the false premises upon which they are built, and the role of international law in constituting and sustaining them. Combining insights from radical critiques, political philosophy, history, and critical development studies, the book explores the pathologies at work in international economic law today. International law must abide by the requirements of justice if it is to make a call for compliance with it, but this work claims it drastically fails do so. In a legal order structured around neoliberal ideologies rather than principles of justice, every state can and does grab what it can in the economic sphere on the basis of power and interest, legally so and under colour of law. This book examines how international law on trade and foreign investment and the law and norms on global finance has been shaped to benefit the rich and powerful at the expense of others. It studies how a set of principles, in the form of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), that could have laid the groundwork for a more inclusive international law without even disrupting its market-orientation, were nonetheless undermined. As for international human rights law, it is under the terms of global capitalism that human rights operate. Before we can understand how human rights can create more just societies, we must first expose the ways in which they reflect capitalist society and how they assist in reproducing the underlying terms of immiseration that will continue to create the need for human rights protection. This book challenges conventional justifications of economic globalization and eschews false choices. It is not about whether one is "for" or "against" international trade, foreign investment, or global finance. The issue is to resolve how, if we are to engage in trade, investment, and finance, we do so in a manner that is accountable to persons whose lives are affected by international law. The deployment of human rights for their part must be considered against the ubiquity of neoliberal globalization under law, and not merely as a discrete, benevolent response to it.
This book identifies the birth, evolution, and intrusive nature of the exploitation of science and technology by a group, accurately and adequately identified as technocrats.
In this era of globalization, people organize into fluid, adaptive networks to solve complex problems and provide resources that nation-states cannot. Examples include the Grameen Bank, mHealth, and the Ushahidi open source software project. Why do these networks succeed where nation-states fail? Only recently have social scientists developed tools to understand exactly how these complex networks self-organize, emerge, adapt, and solve collective problems. Three of these tools—agent-based modeling, social network analysis, and evolutionary computing—are converging in a field known as computational social science. In this provocative book, David C. Earnest discusses how computational social science helps us understand "massively parallel globalization." Using "explorations" of global systems ranging from fisheries to banking, Earnest illustrates the promise of computer models for explaining the surprises, cascades, and complexity that characterize global politics today. These examples of massively parallel globalization contrast sharply with the hierarchical and inflexible governmental bureaucracies that are poorly suited to solve many of today's transnational and global challenges.
How has the regulation of business shifted from national to global institutions? What are the mechanisms of globalization? Who are the key actors? What of democratic sovereignty? In which cases has globalization been successfully resisted? These questions are confronted across an amazing sweep of the critical areas of business regulation--from contract, intellectual property and corporations law, to trade, telecommunications, labor standards, drugs, food, transport and environment. This book examines the role played by global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, World Health Organization, the OECD, IMF, Moodys and the World Bank, as well as various NGOs and significant individuals. Incorporating both history and analysis, Global Business Regulation will become the standard reference for readers in business, law, politics, and international relations.
Marshalling facts and the latest research findings, the author systematically refutes the adversaries of globalization, markets, and progress. This book will change the debate on globalization in this country and make believers of skeptics.
Over the past forty years Europe has grown as a global presence and today it plays an important role in a variety of ways: politically, socially, economically, and culturally. European theologians have no choice but to take cognizance of this fact and respond to the broad social challenges by clarifying their views on God and being a prophetic voice in cultural, political and social decision-making. The authors in this volume take up four main contemporary global challenges, i.e. globalization, violence, gender, and the environment, and the volume provides its readers with first-rate theological reflections in Europe. The articles offered here are the result of an intensive workshop held in Leuven in September 2004 and are sponsored by the European Commission and the VLIR, as part of a three-year study program on the understanding of God in Europe.
The dark horse of the New World Order is not Communism, Socialism or Fascism. It is Technocracy. With meticulous detail and an abundance of original research, Patrick M. Wood uses "Technocracy Rising" to connect the dots of modern globalization in a way that has never been seen before so that the reader can clearly understand the globalization plan, its perpetrators and its intended endgame. In the heat of the Great Depression during the 1930s, prominent scientists and engineers proposed a utopian energy-based economic system called Technocracy that would be run by those same scientists and engineers instead of elected politicians. Although this radical movement lost momentum by 1940, it regained status when it was conceptually adopted by the elitist Trilateral Commission (co-founded by Zbigniew Brzezinski and David Rockefeller) in 1973 to be become its so-called ""New International Economic Order."" In the ensuing 41 years, the modern expression of Technocracy and the New International Economic Order is clearly seen in global programs such as Agenda 21, Sustainable Development, Green Economy, Councils of Governments, Smart Growth, Smart Grid, Total Awareness surveillance initiatives and more. Wood contends that the only logical outcome of Technocracy is Scientific Dictatorship, as already seen in dystopian literature such as "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932) and "Nineteen Eighty-Four" by George Orwell (1948), both of whom looked straight into the face of Technocracy when it was still in its infancy. With over 250 footnotes, an extensive bibliography and clarity of writing style, Wood challenges the reader to new levels of insight and understanding into the clear and present danger of Technocracy, and how Americans might be able to reject it once again.