exam review

Question 1

What is Castelle’s 4 crisis of globalization?

Answer 1

There is a crisis with political legitimacy because everytime a problem does not get solved, there is a decrease in political legitimacy of that institution. This causes a questioning of democracy and the people using it politically

There is a space where issues are defined (Global) and where issues are managed, (Nation-state).
This is the cause of the distinct but related crisis

Crisis of efficiency: Problems cannot be properly managed
Climate change
Crisis of Legitimacy: Space between voter and democratic representative where the voter is doubting legitimacy (Slides say: decisions impacting citizens made outside domestic sphere)
This crisis is made worse by media politics and the politics of scandal
Crisis of Identity: As people don’t feel like they can relate to their nation and the politics they represent, they resist their national identity. (Slides: Weakening of citizens identity, pull towards cultural, NGO’s, ect.)
France with the protests against the government
Crisis of Equality: Market lead globalization often leads to greater inequality between nations and societies (Slides: increase inequality within and between states)
Dependency theory

As a result of these crises and the inability of the government to act on them, non-government actors become the voices of the people thus undermining the central role of the govern

Question 2

What are global vs. transnational issues

Answer 2

Examples of specific global issues are

• Global Security: Terrorist threats taken care of by Interpol
• Human Rights: spreading of democracy and equality for all human beings through the UN
• Environmental issues: Climate change or extinction of a species Paris Climate change agreement

Who are some global actors?

• States: Canada, the USA, China
• Corporations: World Bank, IMF
• NGO’s: Red-Cross, Oxfam
• Social movements: movements against human slavery
• Religious Organizations: Christianity.
• Activists movements: Anonymous

Transnational: Any issue that does not respect borders and often arises from non-state actors

Question 3

Is Globalization a new phenomenon? Yes or no? Explain and give a reason for each answer

Answer 3

Yes

Some argue that it is new because it had to have a starting point and what we see today in terms of compression of time and space between individuals in the world in unprecedented and never seen before so globalization, as we see it today, is new.

No

Globalization is not a new phenomenon it is just more prominent today. From 1800-1900 there has been more immersion in globalization especially economically.

Question 4

Why the term ‘global politics’ and not ‘International Relations’

Answer 4

• All types of politicas are affected by globalization
• Global politics of a concept is more inclusive
• International politicas is between nation states whereas global politics goes beyond that to include all global actors
• Incorporates more relative aspects of the world.
• Pushes towards a global ‘we’

Question 5

Explain the phrase “compression of space and time” as a description of globalization

Answer 5

Globalization is an expression of space and time because of how it allows people to connect with events far away from oneself but empathize with it as a result of this compression. Typical things like communication that were once bound by how far you live from the other person surpass the bondings of space and time by simply allowing you to send a letter within 3 business days across the world or even shot an email virtually instantly.

Question 6

what does steger mean by the term ‘glocalization’?

Answer 6

Glocalization: a matter of conducting business in both a global and local manner

Example

-The fifa 2014 game in Brazil is an example of glocalization…
-Money being made is from international tourist but received and spent of local issues
National teams playing in a brazilian stadium of a crowd filled with locals, nationals, and global watchers as well as a global online audience

Question 7

Explain Steger’s 2 definitions of Globalization (the short one and the very short version)

Answer 7

1. Globalization refers to the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world time and space
2. Globalization is about increasing world wide interconnectivity

Question 8

What does Steger mean when he refers to globalization as a ‘spatial’ concept?

Answer 8

Globalization is a spatial concept signifying a set of social processes that transform our present society of conventional nationality into one of globality.

This does not mean that the local and national are becoming irrelevant it just means that they are changing their characteristics to meet

Question 9

Explain Ritzer’s assertion that globalization has turned that which was solid into liquid (and more recently into gas)

Answer 9

Solids

Heavy structures that stop flow and act like obstacles
How people, there ideas and objects were fixed in the pasted due to lack of good transportation and communication (big obstacle of time and space)
Examples: people did not venture far from where they were born and their relationships were restricted to only the people close to them

Liquids

Technological advances in transportation and communication have turned solids into liquids, promoting easier flows
People can travel around the world easier and objects are transported relatively fast, major news networks also help with communications of ideas
Flow if solid objects move across the globe far more readily

Gases

Even lighter than liquids
Think more digital such as texts that happen instantly
Other examples: News, GPS, Video chars

Question 10

What is flow?

Answer 10

Flow: Movement of people, things, information, and places due, in part to the increasing porosity of global barriers.

Good example would be the flow of ideas such as confidentiality in the treatment of HIV/AIDs patients in India which boosted treatment rates as more people were willing to come forward.

Question 11

what are the different types of flow?

Answer 11

4 types of flows

Interconnected flow: global flows that interconnected at various points
Example: Global sex industry which requires the flow of people (workers) and the intersection with customers (sex tourists). Other flows that typically intersect with the sex industry is drugs and money as well as sexually transmitted diseases who are carried by the participants in the industry.

Multidimensional flow: All sorts of things flowing in every conceivable direction among many points of the world.
Example: Not only do goods flow out of the united states (exports) to every part of the world, many more flow into the states as well from other parts of the world. Japanese car, chinese phone, russian sex worker.

Conflicting flow: Transplanetary processes that conflict with one another (and with much else)
Example: Al-qaeda wanted to increase its global influences but the united states wanted to minimize or even demolish it.

Reverse flow: Process which, while flowing in one direction, act back on their source
Also known as “the boomerang effect”
Example: Pollution that is “exported” to other places in the world but its effects come back to affect the source.

Question 12

Explain Ritzer’s ‘Heavy-Light-weightless’ framework?

Answer 12

Technological advances have lightened people, places and objects

Example: How were bibles first printed?
Handmade
Printers
Ebooks

Heavy structures
Example:
established flight routes
Flow of undocumented migrants that take the same path
Can act like an obstacle, border
Importance of networks, not only of people but also interconnected social structures (cities, law) and institutions (family, religion, sport)
Examples:
United states said no to a business being bought by a chinese company because it was a matter of “national- security”
Passports limit your movement

Question 13

Discuss Baumans concepts of “tourist” and “vagabond” (Ritzer chapter 1)

Answer 13

Tourists are more light and move voluntarily

Vagabond’s are heavier, only move of they are forced (civil war, bad climate)

Question 14

Contrast between the Globalist and Skepticism point of view according to Ritzer.

Answer 14

Skeptics View on Globalization
Globalization is nothing special and all that’s been happening is due to development
Globalization is not global because it excludes and even harms a lot of people
There is no global economy, instead the world is breaking into multiple economic and political blocks

Globalists View on Globalization
Yes, globalization is uneven but it is uneven everywhere (in parts of Canada and Somalia)
Majority of the world population interacts with Globalization
Nation states are important but not as important anymore as their control continues to slip on flows through borders (capital, trade)

Question 15

Explain how each view explains the importance of Multinational Corporations.

Answer 15

Globalist

Production of goods has been fragmented so much that home state of the multinational corporation really doesn’t matter.
Example: ford cars that have parts made in both Canada and Mexico with raw materials coming from all over the world

Skeptics

It is an over statement to say that home state doesn’t matter because they are still based in certain countries
Example: BMW headquarters is in germany
States engage in economic imperialism more than multinational corporations

Question 16

What does Ferguson mean when he says that globalization hops rather than flow

Answer 16

Concepts of “flowing” globalization may give the impression that globalization is an even process when in fact it’s not.
Example

In africa certain tourist parts (safari adventures) are sections that are particularly globalized and developed with rules against hunting and such but the rest of africa does not always reflect that

All inclusive resorts

Question 17

Explain Globalphilia and Globophobia

Answer 17

Globalphilia

Focus on human rights and freedom around the world
Focuses on the openness of globalization and the opportunities this brings

Globophobia

Globophobia is centered around nationalism
Expands capitalism (americanizations)
Leftist view: dependency theory
Right view: scared of losing culture

Question 18

Is there a middle ground between globalphilia and globalphobia?

Answer 18

Transformalist view

The world is decentralizing
globalization can work if nations understand and take opportunities and are proactively engaged in the process
Globalization can go in many different directions
Considers who are the agents of globalization? who are the winners and losers?

Question 19

How do we take nature for granted?

Answer 19

Politicas is organized in such a way that that it treats nature as an external force that can be exploited.
We take it for granted by assuming it is there for our use and fail to understand how our actions have consequences
Climate change is the result of “carboniferous capitalism” it is because we are taking this million year old petroleum buried deep in the ground as a fuel to replace labour so that we could continue to make economic goods a

Question 20

What does an indigenous perspective have to offer in terms of a solution for climate change?

Answer 20

-The indigenous perspective sees them and nature as one entity that harmoniously co-exists. As plants and animals continue to be displaced so does the indigenous culture.

• A key assumption that europeans made as they took the land from the indigenous was that the land was ‘empty’ in the sense that it wasn’t being farmed or used productively
• Legal doctrine terra nullius specified that the land was empty
• The connection between life and land is ignored in modern ways of thinking and reduces nature to a simple commodity that is meant for exploitation to reach personal gain.

-Native thinking challenges the separation of nature and society that modernity is based upon

Question 21

How are we remaking nature and how is it a politcal move?

Answer 21

Geopolitics

• Looked at in the largest scale, that of geopolitics and power at the global scale, the pattern of resource exploitation and disruption of local ways of living continues as ever larger appropriate of resources are made to feed and fuel consumption in the metropolitans
• Looks at the environment as a commodity that needs to sustain modern life today
• Violence comes with oil
• It’s a mode of existent that simply doesn’t think that environmental matters that much
• If power matters, then it is a political issue.

Question 22

“There is no external nature that we can manipulate without having to deal with the consequences”

Answer 22

• Cannot see environment as being different from us if we don’t take it for granted
• Our lives and actions have consequences, including for marginalized people who grow our food or live in areas disrupted by oil well, mines and pipelines
• Consequences for everyone especially marginalized people

Question 23

n what are the political and social effects of the internet in the globalization context? How is the internet political?

Answer 23

It has social and politcal effects in different ways

political because of the ways that the government uses it as surveillance and social in the way that corporation use our information

Question 24

Briefly describe poverty using the 4 pairing concepts

Answer 24

Narrow Vs. Broad Conceptualization

-Narrow is easily understood and measurable
-Broad recognized that poverty is complex and has many different dimensions
Cultural, political, environmental
Concept of capability (amartyen sen)
You can have money but if market doesn’t provide food then you are food poor

Absolute Vs. Relative forms

-Absolute forms
People cannot meet their physical needs due to lack of income
Basic human needs approach
-Relative Forms
Poverty as defined relative to what other people have
A farmer in india may seem poor compared to myself but maybe compared to other people in his village may be rich

Objective Vs. Subjective measures

-Objective measures
Clear boundaries, easy to measure allows comparisons across time and space
World bank stating that is you get less than $1 per day, you are in absolute poverty
Sometimes these numbers are arbitrary
-Subjective measures
Self analysis of poverty. How people see themselves compared to others
Meeting people in the amazon and you believing they are poor but they don’t think so

Human agency Vs. Social Structure

-Human Agency
Looks at individual causes of poverty
-Social structure
Looks at identity, race gender, ect and how they cause poverty

Relational view

-Unequal power relations and how poverty is associated with

Question 25

what are the political and social effects of the internet in the globalization context?

Answer 25

-Franklin concludes that the internet “has not only become a critical means and medium for everyday life, economic power, and socio political dissent but also integral to the exercise of power: an object for struggle over its ownership, control and design

-Consider how the internet has become implicated in matters of war and security
Arab spring, they turned off internet access

Consider how the government/ corporations use the internet against citizens/consumers
Examples
-Blocking access to info, censoring web content, data collection, monitoring online behaviour.
-Cambridge analytical politicized the availability of this data,
-Alleged Russian Trolls have attempted to manipulate cultural divides and stroke tension in the US

Corporations’ unilateral decisions may restrict access to the use of the internet in some places
Google can work in China but under Chinese rule

Question 26

What is the global digital divide?

Answer 26

About 55% of the world’s population lacks access to the internet
This is spread of unevenly across the world
35 countries have less than 20% of the population has access to the internet
Rural-Urban gap in many different countries (especially in developing countries)

Question 27

Discuss the Internet Rights and Principles Coalition

Answer 27

-They are trying to incorporate human rights has it pertains to the internet  
Example 
-Universal and equal internet 
-Rights and social justice
-Accessibility

Question 28

explain why people can generally move freely within national borders but not necessarily across them.

Answer 28

-It is easy to move within borders if you are a citizen or if you are in the country legally
-People are free to move across national borders if they are legally authorized to do so
-Both of these are simple answers though because both legality and citizenships
-The way in which citizenship has been granted as well as the ways in which it has been denied have been linked to social and political phenomena that involves power and struggles over meaning and identity same is true for legality
Example:
-A lot of things that use to be legal in the USA before are illegal now such as slavery and women voting.

Question 29

Why is the picture of nation states with clearly defined inside and outside borders unsustainable?

Answer 29

because as we are transitioning to a more liquid world we are seeing collapse of borders and a more global we forming which does not include borders

Question 30

What does society sacrifice when passing laws and restrictions on undocumented people already ‘inside’?

Answer 30

Society sacrifices illegal immigrants potential to prove their ability
Opens doors to vigilantism

Question 31

Overall how does globalization make the conventional meaning of citizenship problematic?

Answer 31

Globalization presents challenges to this concept and raises serious questions as to whether the convention concept of the citizen in political and legal practices which function to exclude and deny to those who are not citizens can ultimately survive since globalization is so inclusive and pushing towards a global ‘we’
What has been called “universal citizenship” in the united states has at various moments in time excluded women, african-americans, and others.

Question 32

2 approaches to nationalism

Answer 32

Modernism

Links the emergence of nation to the modern period in history which is associated with the changes brought about by industrialization and modernism
Bridging of new communities

Primordialist

Emphasizes the importance of objective factors in the formation as ethnic groups such as language, common ancestry, religion ect.

Question 33

Chinese example link to globalization

Answer 33

Chinese Nation building policies towards overseas chinese and ethnic minorities illustrate how nationalism is no delimited by the territorial sovereign boundaries of the state, but work in conjunction with other non-territorial markers of distinction, such as race.

The process of subjectification of fragmented body of ‘relevant people’ is an alternative way of thinking about how people come to identify with nations

Question 34

How does Manzo define slavery ?

Answer 34

Manzo defines modern day slavery as unpaid forced labour but that doesn’t always work
Example
Illegal migrants working in greenhouses that do get paid but their working conditions are similar to those of slaves

Question 35

Ivory coast example

Answer 35

The Ivory coast was a former colony that many focused on the production of ivory but by the start of the early 20th century, ivory was over exploited so instead massive deforestation occurred in order to make room for cash crops such as cocoa and coffee
Once independence was reached in 1960’s the landowning class changed that to economic power which translated to political. 
The continued the growth of cash crops such as cocoa and saw a huge bomb in 1970’s but soon after commodity prices fell causing high level of debt and borrowing which gave way to unfair policy changes. 
Policy changes includes taking away safety nets for farmers so they are open to exploitation by the world market for their commodity prices because of the neoliberal perspective that preaches no regulations. 
Got rid of price guarantee  
Because of this increased insecurity for farmers, they were forced to make their own children work and take on slaves. 
Producers don’t want to have slaves because workers are more productive than forced labour
This caused slavery to be reintroduced as a way of lowering costs

Question 36

Formal Vs informal work

Answer 36

Formal

Contractual, legal, regulated exchange of commodified goods and services negotiated salaries and wages are paid, motivated by some degree of profit seeking
Governed by laws, officially organized economy

Informal

Work that is not recorded or regulated, ranging from socially necessary and volunteer activities (Household child and elder care, domestic work) to illicit shadow activities (paid but no regulation or actively evadeed such as street vending, sex work, arms trading.
Organized in non-formal ways
Rarely counted in official economic analysis

Question 37

Define flexibilization

Answer 37

There has been a push from formal to informal work and one reason for this is flexibilization

As factories around the world work hard to meet the demands of mass consumption, gradually those factories tend to unionize which often gains workers relative security, well paying jobs with good benefits but a higher cost per worker means a higher price for the product which loses the company their competitive edge.

Neoliberal reconstruction has transformed these arrangements and flexibilization is the buzzword that characterises these changes

Production process shifts to spatially dispersed networks
(Global assembly line, subcontracting,smaller enterprises)

Increasingly casualized: non permanent, part time

And informalized: unregulated , non-contractual
Short term rather than long term production planning
Avoidance of organized labour

More and more companies are choosing to take the flexibilization approach even if it harms development of people overall.

Increases the power of management and decreases the choices available to workers.

Question 38

why is inequality different today than in 1945

Answer 38

Inequality is not new but since the inequality that we see today is a result of specific policy changes made in 1945

1. Neoliberal reform
2. A truly global capitalist economy
3. Pursuit of the state and International Organization of greater openness and competitiveness in the global economy

All three of these things taken in combination caused a spike in inequality

The distribution of wealth is different becuase a lot less people have a lot more money

Question 39

Name and briefly define some measures of inequality and incomes across countries. Be sure to mention pros and cons.

Answer 39

It is hard to calculate income between countries because of inflections and the income people recieve after taxes and fees. Also the fact that not all countries release data the same and the different costs of living.

Purchasing Power Parity
How much a basket of goods filled with necessities would cost in each nation
PROS: good for comparing cost of living
CONS: in different cultures, different things are considered a necessity, for example, beef is not a necessity in India

Gini Coefficient
It’s on a scale of 1-0, 1 being inequality and 0 being perfectly equal.
PROS: Good illustration
CONS: It does not take into account informal work and does not tell us the distribution of the inequality.

Quintiles and Deciles
Breaks population into 20% groups and blocks of 10
PROS: easy to manage
CONS: doesn’t show inequality within those groups

Question 40

In terms of world inequality today, what statistics should be highlighted?

Answer 40

The growth of wealth for the top 1% has almost doubled but there as basically been no growth between the bottom 50% and top 1%
In canada top 10% have around 47% of national income
In china and Russia the top 1% has doubled since 1995

Question 41

What does Pasha conclude in his main points about the neoliberalist approach?

Answer 41

Neoliberal solutions to poverty are basically market solutions for essentially social problems

-Emphasis on growth not redistribution
-Shift away from older of development as involving a social wage, food subsidies, infrastructure, etc.
-Microfinance shift focus from inequality to poverty reduction and is fairly limited to helping the poor avoid total destitution rather than a substantial change in living conditions
-Celebrity campaigns to end poverty = a sort of ‘poverty porn’. A voyeuristic culture of celebrity worship has displace politics, shifting responsibility away from those with actual authority it a nebulous global sphere of liberal good heartedness and feel good solidarity with the poor.
NL solutions to poverty = freeing the market by removing obstacles to its operation