Globalization and the Politics of Resistance

and the Politics of Resistance. Edited by Barry K. Gills. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000. Pp. 313. has become a fashionable term ever since the 1980s, but particularly during the 1990s. Despite an extensive usage of the term, globalization is a contested concept with many competing definitions, hypotheses, and perspectives. At the broadest level, it denotes the increasing intensification of cross-border interactions in virtually all spheres of human activity, be it culture, economics, finance, security, the environment, or government structures. The debate on globalization has raged particularly strongly in the international economy discourse, where it has become the main buzzword in explaining the variety of recent events in international relations. Accordingly, this edited volume, which initially appeared as a special issue in the journal, New Political Economy (March 1997, Vol. 2, No. 1), is a useful contribution to the literature. The volume is divided into two main parts. The first part is called Globalization and Resistance: Thinking through Politics. The discussion here focuses on the theoretical aspects of against globalization. The second part is called Strategies of Resistance: From the Local to the Global. This part offers a discussion on the various popular strategies emerging at local, national, regional, and global levels against neoliberal globalization. Taken together, the eighteen chapters in the volume address various aspects of globalization and, in particular, challenge the oft-noted view that the process of globalization is obvious and inexorable. The authors of the chapters argue that globalization is not a process that is external, that is occurring outside the society or state. The book is an effort to bring the people back into the international economy as the agents at the centre of historical change. It seeks to highlight the aspect of globalization in furthering the understanding of this concept. As the editor, Barry Gills notes in the Introduction, (t)he analytical focus of the study of the globalization phenomena must therefore shift from the technical to the political (p. 3). The volume addresses the politics of resistance against globalization from a wide variety of perspectives. It argues that marginalized groups have the right and ability to mitigate the negative repercussions of the globalization process through greater co-ordinated efforts. Richard Falk refers to this process as resisting globalization-- from-above through globalization-from-below (Chapter 4). This volume contends that for the acts of against neoliberal globalization to be successful in the post-Cold War era, at least four changes are required. First, efforts of today cannot retreat into narrow localism or traditional nationalism. Second, greater participation of new groups, such as organized labour and women, is needed so as to construct new practices of global civil society, which is more suited to this globalized era. Third, such acts of would require extensive networking, new communicative and organizational modes of practice, linking local, national, regional, and global level strategies of resistance. Fourth, for successful results in the movements, it is important that a major attitudinal change occur in the social movements. It means not only overcoming the internal flaws of past movements, such as sexism, racism, xenophobia and protectionism, but also overcoming cultural stereotyping by the dominant point of view. On the other side of the coin, there are important issues that the chapters seem to have paid insufficient attention to. For instance, while countries might want to resist the potentially undesirable side-effects of globalization, not every country has the ability, or is in the position to do so. …