Is justice a security issue?

Most people would probably say they would prefer to live in a more just world to a less just one. There is a strong moral basis for preferring justice. But is this a consideration that states and large international organizations need to take into account as they design their strategies and plans for serving their present and future interests? Do national governments have good practical reasons to think about the consequences their policies and actions may have on the circumstances of justice in the world? What about policies and actions through which states attempt to secure their future economic wellbeing -- do policy makers need to pay attention to the social justice consequences of these actions?

There is a strong empirical and historical case for thinking that the answer to this question is "yes." Injustice is a source of resentment, indignation, and conflict. In the long run, the victims of injustice will not be ignored. Justice is a security issue for states and supra-national organizations, and simple prudence demands that policy makers take it into account. To put a simple label on this idea, justice is a security issue.

Here is a European Union statement about its longterm interests that makes this point fairly explicitly (link):

In the context of ever-increasing globalisation, the internal and external aspects of security are inextricably linked. Flows of trade and investment, the development of technology and the spread of democracy have brought prosperity and freedom to many people, while others have perceived globalisation as a cause of frustration and injustice. In much of the developing world, poverty and diseases such as AIDS give rise to security concerns, and in many cases economic failure is linked to political problems and violent conflict. Security is a precondition for development. Competition for natural resources is likely to create further turbulence. Energy dependence is a special concern for Europe.

What are the theoretical and historical arguments for this conclusion? Here are several.

On the side of theory, several points are well established. Chronic and unrelieved poverty leaves people with low attachment to their own societies and less for the global community. The frustration of very basic human needs is bound to fuel indignation and resistance. So poverty and deprivation are causes of resistance. But there is also evidence that inequality itself has negative consequences for a society's health; this is the central finding of The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (link). Finally, the social psychology created by a system that is perceived to be unfair and exploitative is likely to breed resistance and lawless action. Barrington Moore, Jr. was right when in Injustice he wrote:

Without strong moral feelings and indignation human beings will not act against the social order. In this sense moral convictions become an equally necessary element for changing the social order, along with alterations in the economic structure. 469

Gareth Stedman-Jones summarizes Barrington Moore's conclusion in these terms: "His argument is that human beings in stratified societies accept hierarchies of authority, so long as these hierarchies are not merely imposed by force, but based upon an 'unwritten' social contract, which binds together dominant and subordinate groups in a set of mutual obligations" (link).

So there are good empirical reasons, based in social psychology and the study of contentious politics, for expecting that injustice breeds conflict.

Are there historical demonstrations of the consequences of injustice for disorder? There are. We have the examples of slave revolts throughout the Americas in the 18th and 19th centuries; anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia following World War II; the sustained resistance of the Burmese and East Timor peoples to dictatorship; and the sustained struggle for equal rights in the United States by African Americans, sometimes punctuated by major urban riots. In each case a set of social institutions had been created that were profoundly unjust for a sizable population, and this population gathered resolve and courage in opposing those arrangements.

So the conclusion seems clear. If we want to have a world in which there is a sustainable level of the rule of law and a low level of social conflict, we need to invest in justice. We need to work to create a system in which all peoples can satisfy their most basic human needs; where everyone can feel that he/she is respected in her humanity; and where no one judges that the basic structure of social life is exploitative.

In other words, states are well advised to actively include the basic requirements of justice in their plans for the future. Otherwise they are simply creating the tinder for future conflict.

Global justice

There is a clear and reasonably uncontroversial basis for a simple theory of justice that all nations/cultures can accept. This is grounded a few core values about human development and is expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Millenium Development Goals, and other founding documents of the United Nations. This conception emphasizes several key values:

• equal worth of all persons
• value of freedom
• value of democracy and self-determination
• the injustice of hunger, lack of education, lack of healthcare
• the injustice of capricious arrest and state violence (illegality)

These values provide a basis for steering our core institutions and practices in the direction of greater justice: whenever it is possible to reform institutions and practices in ways that enhance one or more of these factors, we should do so.  Policy makers and legislators can ask the question, how will this or that change to a set of institutions affect the well-being of individuals and populations affected; how will the change affect the freedoms and opportunities for self-determination of the people affected; how will it work to increase the effective scope of law within various societies?

John Rawls drew a strong distinction between ideal justice and imperfect justice, and noted that his contributions were directed to the formulation of a theory of ideal justice (Justice as Fairness: A Restatement, 13).  He did not believe that the ideal theory of justice would suffice to provide a road map for creating a more just society.  When we consider the complexity and difficulty of improving the justice of fundamental international institutions and relations, the program of arriving at an ideal theory seems unappealing.  Instead, we need to have some plausible and action-supporting principles that allow for practical improvement in the overall justice of the global system. We need to have some concrete ideas about how to get from here to there.

This approach -- the idea that we can improve justice in a piecemeal way -- spares us the heroic pretense of offering a general, universal theory of justice that we hope or expect all people can be persuaded to accept. It works from the point of view that injustice is more specific and more widely agreed upon. We don't need to engage in irresolvable debates about whether there are universal human rights in order to agree that the world will be more just if fewer people are forced into famine conditions.

This is the approach taken by Madison Powers and Ruth Faden in their study of the ethics of global public health in Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy (link), and it has the clear advantage of pragmatism.  It is pragmatic on the side of moral agreement, in the sense that it makes no strong claims about abstract moral theories that may be controversial across perspectives.  And it is pragmatic on the side of policy, in the sense that it provides an incremental strategy for improving the conditions of justice in the world.  And in fact, the premises mentioned above conform fairly closely to the six dimensions of personal well-being that Powers and Faden highlight: health, personal security, reasoning, respect, attachment, and self-determination.

One of the greatest advocates for justice in global development is Amartya Sen (Development as Freedom).  Sen's major contribution is the idea of the importance of creating conditions in which people can fulfill and actualize their human capabilities.  Sen's most recent work on global justice topics is his The Idea of Justice, in which he offers an alternative to Rawls's approach to the problem.  Here he gives primacy to the value of full human development as a benchmark for global justice.

I turn now to the second part of the departure, to wit the need for a theory that is not confined to the choice of institutions, nor to the identification of ideal social arrangements. The need for an accomplishment-based understanding of justice is linked with the argument that justice cannot be indifferent to the lives that people can actually live. The importance of human lives, experiences and realizations cannot be supplanted by information about institutions that exist and the rules that operate. (17)

Tom Pogge's work on global justice provides a good bridge between abstract moral theory and practical, real-world issues of justice in a developing world.  Pogge has sought to engage these issues in ways that have real, substantive engagement with the issues of poverty, hunger, and maltreatment that continue to set the stage for the majority of the earth's population today.  In an important recent volume, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms, Andreas Follesdal and Thomas Pogge have pulled together an extended working group of scholars and activists concerned with global justice.  The volume took its origin at a conference in Oslo in 2003.  (Here is an article by Pogge on global justice and poverty (link), and here is a video interview with Pogge on the consequences of the global economic crisis on poverty; link.)  Pogge and his colleagues focus closely on the actual workings of international institutions to attempt to measure the degree to which they disadvantage the people of the less-developed world.

Consider for example a long-term contract concerning the exportation of natural resources which the government of some African country concludes with a rich Western state or one of its corporations.  Within the traditional philosophical framework, it is self-evident that such an agreement must be honored: "People are to observe treaties and undertakings" says Rawls's second principle of state conduct, and the third one adds: "Peoples are equal and are parties to the agreements that bind them" (Rawls 1999). But here is the reality. The African government is corrupt and oppressive, and its continuation in power depends largely on the military.  The sales it conducts impose environmental harms and hazards on the indigenous population. Yet, most of these people do not benefit, because the revenues are partly siphoned off by the small political elite and partly spent on arms needed for military repression. (These arms are suppled by other rich Western states in accordance with other contracts executed, without coercion, between them and the African government.) (5)

Why should gimlet-eyed policy makers take these arguments about global justice seriously?  What does justice have to do with the nuts and bolts of international economic policy reform?  Why should self-interested nations and their leaders adjust their policies to the demands of justice? The humanitarian and moral reasons are self-evident.  But it is also true that there is a powerful reason to care about justice that is based in self-interest.  This is because systemic injustice is itself a threat to national security.  Governments are destabilized, insurgencies are supported, cities experience riots, and anti-liberal violent movements flourish in conditions where masses of people are enmeshed in circumstances of injustice.  Barrington Moore, Jr. made these arguments in Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978), and his conclusions seem even more compelling in the world today.

Ethical thinking for global public health

Here is a fine recent book that brings together recent thinking about development ethics with some of the specific issues faced in the field of global public health. Madison Powers and Ruth Faden published Social Justice: The Moral Foundations of Public Health and Health Policy in 2008, and it represents a genuinely interesting extended essay on the topic of justice in global health policy.  Here is an early statement of their governing perspective:

Our central focus, only vividly appreciated in hindsight, was in a notion of social justice that went beyond issues of distributive justice, micro-allocational questions of priority setting in medical care, or any number of questions centered on how one individual fares relative to some other individual. Beginning, as we did, with moral questions in public health and health policy, it is perhaps not surprising that our focus in social justice is largely directed at the well-being of people in social communities or groups. (ix)

 What is evident here is that Powers and Faden are bringing the perspective of public health into the discussion of issues that have been raised in other contexts (development ethics, bio-medical ethics) without the population-based starting point.

A second important difference in approach taken by Powers and Faden is to take seriously the finding within public health studies that inequalities come into populations' health outcomes in ways other than inequalities of access.

We contend that it is impossible to make progress in our understanding of the demands of justice within medical care without looking outside of medical care to public health and to the other determinants of inequalities in health and indeed without situating an analysis of justice and health policy in the wider social and political context. (x)

This perspective brings Powers and Faden into a degree of connection to Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson in The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (link).

A third distinctive feature of the project is the authors' rejection of the goal of arriving at a simple, unified theory of health justice.

In place of some single theory of justice drawn from one of the leading contenders for being the "right" account of justice, we argue instead that most of these other contenders have it wrong.  Indeed, we use the term 'theory' somewhat  cautiously. ... We choose to steer a middle course on the question, and we agree with Thomas Nagel's conclusion that whatever we are likely to attach the label of 'theory' to in the realm of normative inquiry will reflect an aspiration to develop some systematic but noncomprehensive account of some part of the moral landscape. (x)

The job of justice, as we see it, is to specify those background social and economic conditions that determine whether certain inequalities, that may themselves result from the promotion of other indispensable moral aims, should be seen as unfair. Ours is an account of justice that denies that there are separate spheres of justice, within health policy or within social policy more generally. (x)

Ours is a nonideal theory of justice, intended to offer practical guidance on questions of which inequalities matter most when just background conditions are not in place. (30)

Their central concern is with justice in health; and this comes down to a theory about inequalities.

The central question we pose in this book is, Which inequalities matter most? The aim of this book is to develop a theory of social justice suitable for answering questions of this kind in a variety of concrete circumstances.  (3)

But they insist on the point that theirs is not an "ideal" theory of justice; rather, it is intended to provide the basis for reasoned decisions about the practical, real problems we face in a world of substantial inequalities in life prospects.  Moreover, their account does not begin with a principle of distributive justice, but rather with a conception of the human good.  They offer Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum as exemplars rather than John Rawls (4).

As Sen correctly notes, a theory of justice of this sort begins with some underlying account of what persons "can do and be" (Sen 1993). Theories in this tradition start with ideals, to be sure, but they are ideals of a very different kind from those that form the starting points of Rawlsian ideal theory. (4)

So their theory is one that begins with a rich conception of human well-being and flourishing, not with a contractual deliberation between hypothetical individuals behind a veil of ignorance.  Here is a general statement of their view:

Social justice is concerned with human well-being. In our view, well-being is best understood as involving plural, irreducible dimensions, each of which represents something of independent moral significance. Although an exhaustive, mutually exclusive list of the discrete elements of well-being is not our aim (and may not be possible), we build our account around six distinct dimensions of well-being, each of which merits separate attention within a theory of justice. These different dimensions offer different lenses through which the justice of political structures, social practices, and institutions can be assessed. Without attention to each dimension, something of salience goes unnoticed. (15) 

The six dimensions of well-being that they identify include health, personal security, reasoning, respect, attachment, and self-determination (16).

This approach has a lot in common with Amartya Sen's most recent thinking in The Idea of Justice (as well as Sen's earlier work and that of Martha Nussbaum).  Here is Sen's description of his work in The Idea of Justice:

What is presented here is a theory of justice in a very broad sense.  Its aim is to clarify how we can proceed to address questions of enhancing justice and removing injustice, rather than to offer resolutions of questions about the nature of perfect justice. (kl 183)

Here the emphasis is on "enhancing" justice rather than providing a conception of ideal justice.  Sen's work here is intended to be practical: it should assist policy makers in their deliberations as reforms are considered.  Sen refers to this approach as "comparative justice".

We are engaged in making comparisons in terms of the advancement of justice whether we fight oppression (like slavery, or the subjugation of women), or protest against systematic medical neglect (through the absence of medical facilities in parts of Africa or Asia, or a lack of universal health coverage in most countries in the world, including the United States), or repudiate the permissibility of torture ..., or reject the quiet tolerance of chronic hunger. (kl 225)

In terms of the analysis offered by Powers and Faden, we improve justice by moving a population forward in any one of the six (or more) dimensions of human well-being that were noted.

Inherent in the idea of comparing the justice of several different scenarios, is the idea of reasoning across different perspectives on justice.  Sen is committed to the notion that it is possible to engage in reasoned dialogue with people with whom you have deep disagreements about starting points.  And this theory of comparative justice is intended to help facilitate those reasoned discussions.

Sen contrasts his approach to justice with that of John Rawls in these terms:

In the approach to justice presented in this work, it is argued that there are some crucial inadequacies in [Rawls's] overpowering concentration on institutions (where behaviour is assumed to be appropriately compliant), rather than on the lives that people are able to lead. (kl 203)

Several things seem important to me in both books mentioned here.  First, each is an innovative contribution to issues that are core to what we might refer to as "global justice" -- hunger, health, abusive states, educational deprivation.  Second, each is aiming to create a philosophical framework within which practical, real-world issues can be handled in a reasoned way.  Third, each seeks to broaden the moral perspective of contractualism that has set the terms for discussions of justice for the past forty years.  And, finally, each shuns the goal of formulating a general system or a unified theory on the basis of which to judge all possible social arrangements in terms of justice.

These features make the moral ideas of Powers, Faden, and Sen particularly helpful when we turn our attention to trying to influence international practices and institutions in the direction of greater justice for the people of the world.  The arguments are pragmatic, modest in scope, and potentially less bound to a particular tradition of moral thinking.  (Sen makes this latter point quite explicitly: "Some of the reasoning of, for example, Gautama Buddha (the agnostic champion of the 'path of knowledge'), or of the writers in the Lokayata school (committed to relentless scrutiny of every traditional belief) in India in sixth-century BC, may sound closely aligned, rather than adversarial, to many of the critical writings o the leading authors of the European Enlightenment" (kl 268).)

International social science

Last month the International Social Science Council (ISSC) launched a major review of the status of the social sciences worldwide (link).  The report was commissioned and partially funded by UNESCO.  The full report is available as a PDF file, and it is an important piece of work.  It includes review essays by leading social scientists and chiefs of social science research organizations in Europe, North America, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean, and it makes an effort to provide a fairly comprehensive snapshot of the current state of affairs in the institutions, funding, and patterns of collaboration that currently drive social science research programmes in almost all regions of the world.  (It is interesting to observe that there is not a single mention of social science research in Israel.)

The primary focus of the report is on the institutional settings within which social science research takes place globally: for example, funding systems, universities and institutes, peer review systems, and publication systems.  To what extent are these institutions, in various regions of the world, succeeding in supporting and encouraging the kinds of social science research that will further the policy and informational needs of the publics they serve?  And to what extent are there substantial differences across regions of the world with respect to the depth and effectiveness of these institutional supports for the social sciences?

Here are three high-level changes in the social sciences that are noted in the report:

Three changes in the environment of social science production are particularly likely to affect their content, role and function. These are first, globalization, leading to the parallel internationalization of some public concerns and of social science research itself; second, changes in the institutional and social organization of social sciences; and third, the increased role of new information technology (IT) in the production and dissemination of social sciences. (1)

A more pervasive finding that structures many chapters in the report is the idea of "divides" within and across the world's communities of social scientists.  Most fundamental is the gap in resources and institutional capacity that exists between North and South with respect to social science research:

For any observer of social sciences worldwide, the most striking divide is between countries and regions. There is not much in common between a social science department in a well-endowed university of the global North and a social science research institute in a Southern country suffering from economic and political instability. (3)

(Here is a map indicating widely different levels of spending on tertiary education across the globe:)

But the report also highlights divides across the practices of the social sciences that reflect real differences in intellectual commitments:

From an epistemological point of view, social sciences have been diverse and are characterized by a multiplicity of methods, approaches, disciplines, paradigms, national traditions and underlying political and social philosophies. (3)

Before undertaking such a survey, it is necessary to have a working conception of the definition and role of the social sciences.  The report takes a pragmatic approach; the social sciences are "the disciplines whose professional association is part of ISSC" (3).  But here is the closest the report comes to framing the intellectual task of the social sciences:

The social sciences are concerned with providing the main classificatory, descriptive and analytical tools and narratives that allow us to see, name and explain the developments that confront human societies. They allow us to decode underlying conceptions, assumptions and mental maps in the debates surrounding these developments. They may assist decision-making processes by attempting to surmount them. And they provide the instruments to gauge policies and initiatives, ‘and to determine what works and what does not’. (9)

Another organizing thread in the work of this large team of collaborators is the idea that the social sciences are most valuable when they make a contribution to the solution of important social and political problems.  They specifically refer to a set of common challenges that are of concern to virtually all the regional research communities surveyed here:

Challenges such as environmental change, poverty, financial crisis and inequality, as well as trends affecting human societies such as ageing, marginalization and the rise of cities as strategic economic spaces in the global economy are occurring everywhere but take on different forms according to local contexts. The authors discuss a wide array of challenges and trends, but other challenges such as gender issues, public health concerns, security, food crisis, migrations, diversity and integration, and burning issues and trends could also have found a place in this section. (9-10)

The greatest value and interest of this report is the degree of detail it is possible to glean from the summary reports provided by the regional associations of the social sciences.  This gives a cumulatively detailed impression of the ways in which the social sciences are framed in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, and Latin America, as well as North America and Europe.  Here is a nice example from Huang Ping's survey of the status of the social sciences in China, where Ping provides historical context for Chinese social science:

In terms of what we see today, the status of the social sciences in China can be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the first generation of Chinese students and scholars returned from Western countries, mostly the UK and the USA, after completing their degrees or their research.

After the Second World War and since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, social sciences in China have developed along three traditions: Chinese scholarly academia, especially Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism; focusing on economics in line with Soviet influences and Marxist studies; and later, Western approaches.

During the Cultural Revolution (1966–76), social sciences almost disappeared and were hardly taught. After the opening-up process initiated in 1978, social sciences, along with science and research in general, were resumed and given a mandate to support the reform process. The Soviet influence gradually disappeared, and Western, especially US, social science approaches became the most influential. Sociology, for example, had been banned since 1952 and was reintroduced in 1979. During the past decade, traditional Chinese academic traditions have been reintroduced in universities and have caught the interest of an increasing number of students. (73)

The report does not explicitly attempt to map the range and diversity of research priorities in different regions of the world; but it is possible to begin to do so by paying close attention to the surveys offered by the regional associations for social science research. Topics vary across regions. What is more difficult to assess is the degree to which epistemologies, theories, and intellectual frameworks vary as well -- though Sandra Harding's contribution points in this direction. (See an earlier posting discussing work by Gabriel Abend on "Styles of Epistemology" (link).)

Particularly interesting for me are short pieces by Saskia Sassen ("Cities in today's global age"), Craig Calhoun ("Social sciences in North America"), Akhil Gupta ("Construction of the global poor"), David Harvey ("A financial Katrina?"), Jon Elster ("One social science or many?"), and Sandra Harding ("Standpoint methodologies and epistemologies: A logic of scientific inquiry for people").

In short, this is a genuinely interesting and detailed review of the status of the social sciences in the world today, and anyone with an interest in the "sociology of the social sciences" and the globalization of social knowledge will want to read it carefully.

A modern world-system?

Source : Minard’s Map of Port and River Tonnage

Immanuel Wallerstein created a huge stir in the 1970s with the publication of The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (1974).  The book is an intellectual masterpiece, synthesizing a vast range of fundamental literature on the economic history of Europe and the world.  You could look at the book as the first serious and extended effort to theorize globalization -- a term that barely existed at the time of publication. Or you could look at it as a general theory of colonialism -- an account of the pathways and influences through which the metropole dominated and exploited the periphery. It is worth looking back at this work today to tease out some of the guiding assumptions about history, sociology, and globalization it reflected.

The concept of "world system" is itself a key component of our current understanding of globalization, in that it captures the idea of causal interconnectedness across the globe among major organizations, firms, populations, and states.  Wallerstein observes that earlier social scientists had usually centered their analysis at the level of the political unit -- the nation-state; whereas his own approach is different:

This book makes a radically different assumption.  It assumes that the unit of analysis is an economic entity, the one that is measured by the existence of an effective division of labor, and that the relationship of such economic boundaries to political and cultural boundaries is variable, and therefore must be determined by empirical research for each historical case.  Once we assume that the unit of analysis is such a "world-system" and not the "state" or the "nation" or the "people", then much changes in the outcome of the analysis. (xi)

But what, more exactly, did he mean by a system?  Did he imagine something analogous to a mechanical system in which the relations among the parts were governed by a few simple laws?  He seems to suggest this possibility when he asks the question, "What do astronomers do?  As I understand it, the logic of their arguments involves two separate operations.  They use the laws derived from the study of smaller physical entities, the laws of physics, and argue that ... these laws hold by analogy for the system as a whole.  Second, they argue a posteriori.  If the whole system is to have a given state at time y, it most porrobably had a certain state at time x" (7).  Here he seems to suggest that social systems are tied together by the working of governing laws -- a particularly unconvincing starting point.

But Wallerstein's practice as a sociologist is far more defensible than this language would suggest.  He was in fact sensitive to causal heterogeneity, contingency, and variation in the systemic relations he meant to capture -- particularity as well as universality.  So he doesn't actually treat the modern world system as if it were analogous to a set of gravitational objects governed by fixed laws of nature.

I think the clue to an answer to his working definition of a system is found in his definition of scope in terms of an "effective division of labor": a set of regions constitute a system in his framework if there is significant exchange and dependence among various of the regions for products, people, knowledge, skills, and resources from other regions.  If Europe, Asia, or the Americas had been "autarkic" in 1700 -- that is, if one or more of these continental regions had been a closed economy and society making no substantial use of products, knowledge, resources, or people from other regions -- then there would not have been one "world system" but rather several independent macro-regional systems.  And Wallerstein explicitly affirms this point late in the book:

By saying that in the sixteenth century there was a European world-economy, we indicate that the boundaries are less than the earth as a whole.  But how much less?  We cannot simply include in it any part of the world with which "Europe" traded.  In 1600 Portugal traded with the central African kingdom of Monomotapa as well as with Japan.  Yet it would be prima facie hard to argue that either Monomotapa or Japan were part of the European world-economy at that time.  And yet we argue that Brazil (or at least areas of the coast of Brazil) and the Azores were part of the European world-economy. (199)

So in postulating the concept of world system as a framework for analysis of the modern period (let's say 1700), Wallerstein is laying a few important cards on the table; he is indicating his judgment that there was significant and necessary exchange among virtually all accessible places on the planet.  There were economically meaningful movements of resources, people (emigrants and slaves), crops (cotton, sugar), finished products, and ideas throughout the system of places defining the system of transport and trade.  This in turn implies that we cannot properly understand the workings of the regional economy without taking into account its exchange relations with other regions -- or in other words, we need to place the regional economy into the system of international division of labor in which it is located.  And in fact, historians like Ken Pomeranz make a substantial case for the empirical accuracy of that judgment (see for example The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy and The World That Trade Created: Society, Culture, And the World Economy, 1400 to the Present).

If we begin with this assumption -- the idea of the substantial interdependence of continental regions in the early modern period -- then we are naturally drawn to the question, what were the terms of trade?  Was exchange among regions mutually beneficial, as trade theory would have it?  Or was it extractive and exploitative, as the theory of colonialism would have it?  This is where Wallerstein makes substantial use of the core-periphery framework in his analysis.

The periphery of a world-economy is that geographical sector of it wherein production is primarily of lower-ranking goods ... but which is an integral part of the overall system of the division of labor, because the commodies involved are essential for daily use.  The external arena of a world-economy consists of those other world-systems with which a given world-economy has some kind of trade relationship ... what was sometimes called the "rich trades." (199-200) 

Wallerstein was particularly interested in interconnections between places that were the expression of power and commerce.  Core and periphery are linked by relations of subordination -- military and economic domination, leading to the persistent disadvantage of the latter in favor of the former.  These features define the "general attributes of a colonial situation" (5).

This analysis lays a theoretical and historical foundation for a theory of globalization.  Wallerstein writes late in the book:

One of the persisting themes of the history of the modern world is the seesaw between "nationalism" and "internationalism." I do not refer to the ideological seesaw ... but to the organizational one.  At some points in time the major economic and political institutions are geared to operating in the international arena and feel that local interests are tied in some immediate way to developments elsewhere in the world.  At other points of time, the social actors tend to engage their efforts locally, tend to see the reinforcement of state boundaries as primary, and move toward a relative indifference about events beyond them. (147)

Where has the effort to theorize globalization gone in the thirty-five years since Wallerstein's book appeared? A particularly important contemporary voice on this subject is that of Saskia Sassen.  Her recent A Sociology of Globalization (2007) represents a current cutting-edge effort to provide a vocabulary and set of theoretical premises in terms of which to understand the global interconnectedness that characterizes the contemporary world. And she wants to provide a sociology of these processes -- that is, she wants to provide a theoretical vocabulary and a set of hypotheses about the causal mechanisms that are involved that are adequate to the problem of describing and explaining the workings of this system. One thing this means is providing a framework within which the empirical details and structures of global networks can be investigated.  Another key point in her approach is her attention to differentiation across institutions and mechanisms.

A deeply important part of her analysis is her effort to overturn the assumption of "linearity" and hierarchy among levels of analysis -- the line of thought that assumes that neighborhoods are encompassed by cities, which fall within regions, which fall within states, which fall within international relations.  She argues repeatedly and effectively that this linear scheme doesn't work for today's global relationships.  The local neighborhood may be implicated in extra-national relations of immigration, crime, and trade that make it a global place.  More importantly, what she calls "global cities" have crucial relationships at many levels in these supposed hierarchies -- local, national, and supra-national.  So the question of scale cannot be defined within a simple hierarchy of relationships of locality, nationality, and globality.  (Significantly, Wallerstein opens his treatment of the modern world system by wrestling with this issue -- a discussion that he frames in terms of the idea of the appropriate unit of analysis in considering colonialism.)

Sassen is particularly interested in the networks of communication, finance, and service organizations that constitute the fabric joining what she calls "global cities" (link; see also an earlier posting on regional interdependence). But in this book Sassen broadens considerably the angle of view in order to consider social networks at many levels of scale, including sub-national as well as supra-national.

Sassen makes an important point about international economic power that has a Wallerstein-like feel to it but that would probably not have been true in 1700 or 1970.  This is her view that there has been an important process of "de-nationalization" that has removed traditional powers of the state and placed them in the scope of international economic and finance institutions that are significantly controlled by large economic actors and firms. We sometimes refer to this process as one of "liberalization"; Sassen makes the point that the construction of the new supra-national regulatory regimes is an extended historical process that can be studied in detail.  She refers to the result of this process as the global corporate economy.  One of Wallerstein's key arguments is that nations in the periphery were dominated and controlled by an economic system run by European nations. Sassen argues for the reality of a world system of regulatory arrangements that subordinates the sovereignty of even previously hegemonic nations to a non-democratic set of institutions and rules that implicitly favor one set of economic actors over others.  But Sassen's inference from this fact about international economic power is less about north-south exploitation and more about the rising likelihood of global exploitation of all ordinary citizens by powerful extra-national economic forces that are beyond the reach of democratic processes (what she refers to as the "democratic deficit").

Sassen's book warrants a close reading.  It proposes a significantly different way of conceptualizing the meaning of globalization, and one that will suggest many new research agendas.

(The Minard trade map above is borrowed from the fascinating blog Cartographia.  The blog has many great discussions of some very interesting maps.)

Alternative economists

Traditional neoclassical economics has missed the mark quite a bit in the past two years. There is the financial and banking crisis, of course; neoclassical economists haven't exactly succeeded in explaining or "post-dicting" the crisis and recession through which we've traveled over the past year and more. But perhaps more fundamentally, neoclassical economics has failed to provide a basis for understanding the nuance and range of our economic institutions -- nationally or globally. Contemporary academic economics selects a pretty narrow range of questions as being legitimate subjects for economists to study; so topics such as hunger, labor unions, alternative economic institutions, and the history of economic thought generally get fairly short shrift. Don't expect to see the perspectives of Steven Marglin or Samuel Bowles in Economics 101 in most U.S. universities! The profession has a pretty narrow conception of what "economics" is.

And yet, when intelligent citizens think about the key problems of economics in a broader sense -- the problems that we really care about, the problems that will really influence our quality of life -- we certainly think of something broader than the mathematics of supply and demand or the solution of a general equilibrium model. We're ultimately not as interested in the formalisms of market equilibrium as we are in an analysis of the institutions that define the context of economic activity. We want to know more about the ways in which features of economic organization and the basic institutions of our economy influence individual behavior; we are curious about how our institutions create distributive outcomes that fundamentally affect people's lives differently across social groups. We would like to have a clearer understanding of some of the ways that non-economic factors -- race, gender, age, city -- influence people's economic outcomes. We want to know how the institutions and incentives defined by our economic system bring about effects on the natural environment. And we are often curious about how it might be possible to reform our basic economic institutions in ways that are more favorable to human development. In other words, we are often brought to think along the lines of some of the great dissenters in the economics tradition -- Polanyi, Dobb, Marx, Sen, McCloskey, and Dasgupta (An Inquiry into Well-Being and Destitution), for example. (In a very contemporary and topical way, Richard Florida takes on a lot of these issues; see his blog, the Creative Class.)

It is therefore pleasing to find that some publishers like Routledge are bringing out serious academic works in what they refer to as "social economics". The Routledge series, Advances in Social Economics, has a list of titles representing recent work that is rigorous and insightful but that explores other points of the compass within the field of political economy. I certainly hope that university libraries around the world are paying attention to this series; these are titles that can add a lot to the debate.

One book in the series in particular catches my eye. My colleague Bruce Pietrykowski raises an important set of "alternative" economic issues in his recent book, The Political Economy of Consumer Behavior: Contesting Consumption. (Here is a preview of the book from Routledge.) The book is a valuable contribution and very much worth reading.

Pietrykowski has two intertwined goals in the book. First, he wants to provide a broader basis for understanding consumer behavior and psychology than is presupposed by orthodox economists. And second, he wants to help contribute to a broader understanding of the scope, methods, and content of political economy than is provided by mainstream economics departments today.

Here is his preliminary statement of his goal:

I argue that in order to arrive at a more compelling account of consumer behavior we need to transform the discipline of economics by opening up the borders between economics and sociology, geography, feminist social theory, science studies and cultural studies. (2)

The fact of consumption is a crucial economic reality in any economy. How do individuals make choices about what and how to consume? Pietrykowski makes the point that consumption behavior shows enormous heterogeneity across groups defined in terms of ethnicity, gender, region, and time -- a point made here as well (post). So a single abstraction representing the universal consumer won't do the job. The standard economic assumption of the rationally self-interested consumer with consistent and complete preference rankings is seriously inadequate; instead, we need to develop a more nuanced set of views about the psychological and social factors that influence consumer preferences and choices.

So it is important to develop alternative theoretical tools in terms of which to analyze consumer psychology. Here Pietrykowski draws on ideas from Karl Marx (fetishism of commodities), Amartya Sen, and other political economists who have attempted to provide "thick" descriptions of economic behavior. The point here is not that we cannot usefully investigate and theorize about consumer behavior; rather, Pietrykowski is looking for an analytical approach that operates at the "middle range" between complete formal abstraction and the writing of many individual biographies.

Second, Pietrykowski is interested in contributing to a "re-mapping" of the knowledge system of economic thought, by exploring some of the alternative constructions that have been bypassed by the profession since World War II. (These arguments are largely developed in Chapter Two.) Pietrykowski begins with the assumption that the discipline and profession of economics is itself socially constructed and contingent; it took shape in response to a fairly specific set of theoretical and methodological ideas, it was subject to a variety of social and political pressures, and there were viable alternatives at every turn. Here is how he formulates the social construction perspective:

The claim that economic knowledge is socially constructed allows for an understanding of the field as the outcome of interpretation, negotiation and contestation over the constituents of economic knowledge and the legitimacy of particular practices, methods, and techniques of analysis. (19)

Like Marion Fourcade, Pietrykowski argues that there is a great deal of path dependence in the development of economics as a discipline and profession; and there are identifiable turning points where we can judge with confidence that themes that were eliminated at a certain time would have led to a substantially different intellectual system had they persisted. Pietrykowski's analysis of the fifty years of development of professional economics in the first half of the twentieth century is a very nice contribution to a contemporary history of science, and very compatible with Fourcade's important work in Economists and Societies: Discipline and Profession in the United States, Britain, and France, 1890s to 1990s.

The discipline of "home economics" in the 1920s and 1930s is the example that Pietrykowski examines in detail. "This task ... of defining economics as a distinct professional discipline involved both recruitment and exclusion" (28). Here is how Pietrykowski describes home economics:

Departments of home economics were quite diverse in the early twentieth century. Commonly associated with maintaining and preserving the cult of domesticity, home economics programs emerged from multiple sources including progressive political reform of public health, labor conditions, and household management. (35)

And, of course, home economics did not long remain a part of the professional discipline of economics. Pietrykowski looks in detail at the way in which home economics developed as an academic discipline at Cornell University; and he documents some ways in which the discipline of economics was constructed in a gendered way to exclude this way of understanding scientific economics: "The decision was made that women involved in the emerging field of home economics were to be excluded from the AEA.... Economics was to be concerned neither with women's activities in the home nor with women's activities in the workplace" (28-29).

Pietrykowski develops his full analysis of consumption by focusing on three heterodox approaches to understanding consumption: home economics and feminist analysis, psychological and behavioral research on consumer behavior (George Katona), and Fordism and the theory of mass consumption. He also gives some attention to the emerging importance of experimental economics as a tool for better understanding real economic decision-making and behavior (20-25).

After discussing these heterodox theories, Pietrykowski illustrates the value of the broader framework by examining three fascinating cases of consumption: the complex motivations that bring consumers to purchase the Toyota Prius, the motivations behind the Slow Food movement, and the choice that people in some communities have to engage in a system of alternative currency. These are each substantial examples of arenas where consumers are choosing products in ways that make it plain that their choices are influenced by culture, values, and commitments no less than calculations of utilities and preferences.

Between the theories and the cases, Pietrykowski offers a remarkably rich rethinking of how people choose to consume. He makes real sense of the idea that consumption is socially constructed (drawing sometimes on the social construction of technology (SCOT) literature). He demonstrates that models based on the theory of the universal consumer are not likely to fit well with actual economic outcomes. And he makes a strong and persuasive case for the need for academic economics to expand its horizons.

I find it interesting to notice that Pietrykowski's account of the ascendency of neoclassical economics since the 1950s converges closely with prior postings on positivist philosophy of science. One of the explicit appeals made by neoclassical economists was a methodological argument: they argued that their deductive, formal, and axiomatic treatments of economic fundamentals were more "scientific" than case studies and thick descriptions of economic behavior. So many of the failings of mainstream economic thought today can be traced to the shortcomings of the positivist program for the social sciences that was articulated in the middle of the twentieth century.

What is Alsace?

It may seem like a strange question: What is Alsace? It is a region of France. It is a culturally and linguistically distinct population of 1.8 million people. Most visitors would observe that there is a distinctive Alsatian style in life, in architecture, and in culture. It possesses one great city (Strasbourg), many middle-sized cities (Hagenau, Wissembourg, Colmar), and hundreds of small villages. It is a beautiful collection of landscapes, villages, fields, forests, and vineyards. It is the homeland of Hansi and Marc Bloch. It is a region that has suffered acutely in warfare -- eastern Alsace was the site of most of the battles of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and it was the site of the final stages of the Battle of the Bulge and the German counteroffensive, Northwind, with intense tank fighting and destruction in dozens of villages. The sufferings of World War II are still remembered by the octagenarians. It is a border culture, with influences from Germany and France establishing aspects of culture and social attitudes over several centuries. And there is always choucroute, kougelhopf, and Kronenberg. In short, Alsace has a history and a set of traditions that set its people apart.

So from the point of view of travel-writing, the question has an easy answer. But the social reality is more complex and fluid. The social reality of Alsace today is highly heterogeneous, within and across villages, towns, and cities. And ongoing processes of nation-building and globalization raise the question of its cultural survival.

Take the issue of language. Stop into any grocery store or hospital in rural Alsace and you will find elderly people gossiping and talking in Alsatian. For many of these people Alsatian was their native language; for some it remained their only language. But the situation is different if you pause to watch boys playing ball in the public square; their chatter is in French -- or sometimes Arabic. So it is an open question whether the Alsatian language community will remain a vital one, or whether it will retreat into the archives. Current estimates indicate that fewer than 10 percent of children in Alsace are fluent in Alsatian. So the question arises, whether the language will reproduce itself into the the next several generations.

Or consider folkloric customs and cuisine -- the colorful costumes and dancing that are still very much a part of village festivals. How long will these customs survive in an age of mass-based entertainment and a homogenizing media culture? How are the customs transmitted across generations? How long can tarte flambée persist as an Alsatian specialty in the face of an onslaught by Pizza Hut?

And how about the distinctive modes of class relations that you find in Alsace -- the ways in which the local bourgeoisie dress and interact with each other, and how they relate to other social strata -- farmers, bus drivers, shop clerks? In what ways are these class relations distinct from those of Bourgogne? And how distinct are they from their counterparts in the United States?

More fundamentally, consider the range of contemporary social problems that Alsace faces, in both its cities and its villages: drug use, youth unemployment and disaffection, hooliganism, poorly assimilated immigrant communities. How will Strasbourg or Hagenau deal with these problems? And will "Alsace" remain? Or will the national strategies of social services, public policy, and legislation lead to a more socially uniform Alsace -- just a quaint set of historical markers on the autoroute?

So really, the question posed here has two distinct parts, both very interesting. The first is historical: what were the rich pathways of culture formation through which Alsace came to be Alsace? How did this particular mix of values, attitudes, modes of behavior, language, and culture come together?

The second part of the question is forward-looking: where is Alsace going? Will it preserve its cultural distinctiveness and its language? Or will it become simply another interchangeable part of France and the world? How much staying power does a traditional culture have in the face of the impulses of nation-building, mass communication, and globalization of consumption that the contemporary world imposes?

These questions are interesting in consideration of Alsace. But they are even more interesting in the context of thinking about globalization itself. Is it possible for local and regional cultures to successfully negotiate the challenges of the twenty-first century in ways that permit the survival of their cultural uniqueness? Or is the global world of the future destined to look more like a very large shopping mall, with the same foods, clothes, and ethics everywhere?

Transnational protest movements

We've seen a fairly large increase in the occurrence of large international protest movements in the past thirty years. The anti-nuclear movement of the 1980s drew a substantial following across Europe and to some extent North America. (Historian E. P. Thompson played a significant leadership role in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; see for example PROTEST AND SURVIVE.) Anti-globalization protests in Seattle, Washington, and Davos drew substantial support from international organizations and participants. Major anti-war protests occurred in numerous European cities after the onset of the US-led war on Iraq. And now protests in London against the G20 meeting and in Strasbourg against NATO have drawn supporters and groups around Europe (post). (Here is a current account of the Strasbourg protests in the Dernieres nouvelles d'Alsace.)

These movements are riveting in a number of ways, from the point of view of sociology and international politics. We can ask questions at every edge of the phenomena:

Power and influence. How effective are mass demonstrations at achieving their declared goals? Do mass demonstrations influence government and multinational policies in the direction intended by the organizers and followers? For that matter -- how much of an influence can a large demonstration in Rome have on a subsequent effort to mobilize over a similar issue in New York? What is the role of mass media in the timing, pace, and public impact of large demonstrations?

Mobilization. What processes of mobilization and organization are at work in these specific periods of mass mobilization? To what extent do modern transnational protests embody a significant degree of common purpose and political identity? (Here's a recent post on the difficulty of defining a group mentality.) What organizations have the most influence in determining the strategy and tactics of the mass political actions that are called for? What networks of leaders and counter-politicians can be discerned in the period of mobilization leading up to the mass event? What is the nature of the networks that exist within the various communities of interest -- environmentalists, anti-war activists, anti-globalization activists? What sorts of issues have proven most potent in mobilizing significant numbers of adherents and organizations from different countries? What motivates followers to heed the call and bring themselves to London or Strasbourg? What is the combination of commitment, identity, and adventure that results in involvement?

Internal politics. What factors internal to a movement -- whether environmentalist, anti-globalization, anti-war, anti-nuclear -- lead to cohesion and dissension within the movement? What factors lead to the occasional outbreaks of violence between protesters and police? (See an earlier post on this question.) Is violence a deliberate tactic on either side -- militants or forces of order? What role do organizations such as anarchist groups and other radical, rejectionist groups play within the broader movement? Is it possible for small groups of rejectionists to "hijack" the large demonstration for their own purposes?

These questions overlap several distinct areas of research: resource mobilization theory, social movements, international relations theory, and comparative politics. (This is a point that McAdam, Tilly, and Tarrow make in Dynamics of Contention: there is much to be gained by studying these contentious movements across the traditional areas of study.) And the questions are probably further complicated by the availability of internet-based forms of communication and mobilization.

Sidney Tarrow has turned his attention to international protest movements as a particularly interesting form of "contentious politics." His 2005 book, The New Transnational Activism, treats international protests and their movements from the point of view of the Tilly-McAdam-Tarrow framework of theory and analysis of contentious politics. Here are a few framing assumptions from the introduction:

Students of domestic movements long ago determined that collective action cannot be traced to grievances or social cleavages, even vast ones like those connected to globalization. Acting collectively requires activists to marshal resources, become aware of and seize opportunities, frame their demands in ways that enable them to join with others, and identify common targets. If these thresholds constitute barriers in domestic politics, they are even higher when people mobilize across borders. Globalization is not sufficient to explain when people will engage in collective action and when they will not.

Nor does combating globalization automatically give rise to "global social movements." For Charles Tilly, a "social movement" is "a sustained, organized public effort making collective claims on target authorities" that uses a well-hewn contentious repertoire on the part of people who proclaim themselves to be worthy, unified, numerous, and committed.

For one thing, forming transnational social movements is not easy. Sustaining collective action across borders on the part of people who seldom see one another and who lack embedded relations of trust is difficult. For another, repertoires of contention grow out of and are lodged in local and national contexts. Even more difficult is developing a common collective identity among people from different cultural backgrounds whose governments are not inclined to encourage them to do so.

Tarrow's central hypothesis about transnational protest movements comes back to the core idea of "opportunity structures." International organizations and networks have created a new set of opportunities for transgressive groups who have an interest in challenging the status quo.

Tarrow identifies several important types of sources of evidence and theory for his current work: international political economy, anthropologists and students of public opinion, specific studies of international protest events, studies of transnational networks and institutions, and theorists of the idea of "global civil society." He explicitly locates the book as falling squarely within the research program established in Dynamics of Contention; his goal is to make use of this ontology of social mechanisms and processes to provide a sociology of transnational protest.

What I'm eager to see is some of the concrete empirical work that this approach suggests: specific empirical studies of the networks, organizations, and dynamic processes through which major transnational protests have unfolded in the past decade or so. It would seem that some important new tools helpful for such study are now much more readily available -- essentially, using the internet to track organizations, announcements, and efforts at mobilization. Tarrow provides some of this research -- for example, in his summary of research on the networks and localism of participants in the "Battle of Seattle". But this level of analysis seems to be where the action needs to be at this point in the study of transnational social movements. But Tarrow is certainly right in thinking that this subject area is important, and it is one that follows very logically from the framework of analysis of social contention developed by himself, Doug McAdam, and Charles Tilly in the earlier Dynamics of Contention.

Intellectual leaders

In 2005 the Nouvel Observateur published a special issue devoted to "25 grands penseurs du monde entier" -- 25 great global thinkers. (The issue was published separately as Le monde selon les grands penseurs actuels.) The selection of thinkers was excellent: Stanley Cavell, Souleymane Diagne, Nestor Garcia Canclini, Sudhir Kakar, Vladimir Kantor, José Gil, Ian Hacking, Candido Mendes, Slavoj Zizek, Jon Elster, Kwame Appiah, Giorgio Agamben, Axel Honneth, Martha Nussbaum, Carlos Maria Vilas, Simon Blackburn, Toni Negri, Charles Taylor, Peter Sloterdijk, Richard Rorty, Philip Petitt, Daniel Innerarity, Jaakko Hintikka, Amartya Sen, and Michael Walzer. The volume consists of smart articles about each thinker offering a brief but meaningful précis of the thinker's main contributions, followed usually by a short impromptu interview with the subject.  (Here is a brief description available online.)

The volume begins with these words:

A l'heure oú l’on parle d’une communauté intellectuelle mondiale virtuelle, on pourrait croire que ce que la planète compte de penseurs originaux est connu de tous ou, à tout le moins, accessible et disponsible à tous. Et pourtant, le provincialisme intellectuel sévit un peu partout, ainsi qu’en témoigne chez nous le germanopratisme de la classe intello-médiatique. On continue d’écrire et de réfléxir ici dans l’ignorance la plus totale de ce que d’éminents penseurs étrangers ont produit là.

A very strong impression of polyglot global intellect emerges from a reading of the whole issue. The collection as a whole is a great antidote to the various forms of parochialism to which the intellectual world is prone -- national assumptions, disciplinary assumptions, north-south assumptions. These thinkers are original, innovative, and usually boundary-crossing. And they are most frequently concerned with issues that are front and center in the task of understanding and improving the global world we collectively inhabit.

There are quite a few cross-cutting themes that recur across various groups of these thinkers. (It would be a very interesting exercise to "tag" each of these thinkers with a handful of topics and then map the relationships among them.) And certainly this is true: we will collectively do a better job of understanding and improving our global world, if we find ways of engaging with the thinking, issues, and frameworks of observers throughout the world. Sociology and philosophy both require new ideas -- and a deep and sustained international conversation can be a source of ideas and corrections to old ideas.

It is very interesting to take stock of the ways that the Internet can now facilitate these international conversations. YouTube is a good example; mixed among the millions of videos of pets and birthday parties are invaluable snippets of insight from the world's most innovative thinkers. Certainly it would be possible to conduct a transformative advanced seminar in social theory -- perhaps online! -- based on materials and videos available on YouTube. But it is interesting as well what we can't yet find on YouTube: selections from intellectuals and theorists from the developing world. It is substantially more difficult to locate web-based resources documenting the thinking of intellectuals from Africa, Latin America, or China.

Here are some YouTube resources on several of the thinkers included in the Nouvel Obs list. Roughly half of the people on the list are featured with snippets of lectures or interviews on YouTube. Think of this posting as a "mash-up" of great ideas and critical thinking.

Amartya Sen, March, 2005

Martha Nussbaum, 2006

Slavoj Zizek - Rules, Race, and Mel Gibson 2006 1/8, European Graduate School

Anthony Appiah, commencement speech at Dickinson College, 2008

Tony Negri, 2008

Stanley Cavell, 2002

Candido Mendes

Giorgio Agamben

Peter Sloterdijk

Richard Rorty

Daniel Innerarity

Global cities -- Saskia Sassen

I have mentioned Saskia Sassen in previous postings, as one of the world's leading theorists of the global city. Here is an interesting lecture that she presented at the UrbanAge India conference in Mumbai in 2007. The lecture is very interesting, and it is also "self-illustrating," in that its availability on YouTube illustrates the remarkable globalization of ideas and discourse that has been created by internet communications tools available everywhere in the world. She talks about cities as centers of "urban knowledge capital", and refers to the mechanisms of communication through which these centers are linked, including especially the channels of internet-based communication and interaction. And the availability of the real-time thinking of leading scholars such as Sassen through YouTube, Google, and other tools -- presented in Mumbai, equally and almost immediately available in Mexico City, Lagos, and London -- is a dramatic illustration of the potential for diffusion and infusion of knowledge that the internet presents to the global world.


Urban Age India: Saskia Sassen Cities in Global Context Pt 1



Urban Age India: Saskia Sassen Cities in Global Context Pt 2



Urban Age India: Saskia Sassen Cities in Global Context Pt 3

The world food system

Here is one very concrete way in which we live in a global world: the most basic need that we have -- food -- is satisfied on the basis of a system with global reach and global price and production interconnections. The planet's 6+ billion people need a daily diet of grains, oils, and protein, and the most important of these foods are produced within the context of a global trading system. Current estimates of malnutrition indicate that a significant percentage of the world's population live in hunger (Facts about Hunger, PRB). And, after a decade or so of relative stability in this system, changes in the world market are threatening major disruptions of food supplies. (See an earlier posting on the recent sharp rise in rice and wheat prices.)

Consider grain production and consumption. Here are a few websites with useful information about the world grain trade in the past decade: USDA, providing a lot of data on grain production and consumption; UC-Davis, a simple introduction to the global and US rice markets; UNCTAD, a thumbnail of the basics of the global rice trade over the past two decades; FAO, a compendium of data on food production; and IRRI, a compendium of data about rice production. One thing that becomes clear in reviewing some of this data is that the current crisis in grain prices should not have been a surprise. The forecast provided in the USDA report is based on 2006-07 data -- and it gives a clear indication of the supply and price crisis that the world is facing today.

This system is interesting for UnderstandingSociety because it provides a nice example of a complex and causally interlinked social system that invites careful analysis. And it is a system that has the potential for stimulating explosive social upheaval -- given the political volatility that food prices and hunger have had historically.

We ought to ask a whole series of questions about how the food system works:

• Technology -- how extensive and widespread are the forms of technology innovation that are changing the food system? Is there a Green Revolution 2.0 underway?
• Productivity -- what are the trends in productivity in agriculture? Output per hectare, output per unit of input, output per labor-day
• International trading institutions -- corporations, commodity and futures markets, flow of incomes to stakeholders. What effect have free-trade agreements had on grain production and prices -- WTO, NAFTA?
• Social institutions of farming. What are the various institutions through which grain is produced -- peasant farming, family farming, large-scale corporate farming
• Social effects of agrarian change -- how do rural conditions and quality of life change as a result of technology change in agriculture?
  
• Macro-stability -- does growth in food supply match growth in population?

If we want to know how the global world works as a system, then we need to understand agriculture and agricultural trade better than we currently realize.

(Here is another New York Times story on the subject, highlighting the tension between food production and greenhouse gas emission reduction. See my earlier post on sustainable agriculture as well.)

What is global about globalization?

Of course we live in a globalizing world. But what does that really mean?

One point that might be made emphasizes the local and the regional rather than the global. This is the observation that every part of the world is undergoing its own process of social change in a distinctive way. China, Brazil, and Nigeria are experiencing very different processes of economic growth and change. Mexico, Kenya, and Sri Lanka are coping with different forms of insurgency and ethnic conflict. India, Spain, and Guatemala witness very different social processes affecting peasants and rural society. So we might say that the whole world is changing -- but with different processes and dynamics everywhere. On this line of thought, the global world is really just a patchwork of the many peoples, regions, and processes that are found in various countries.

What is genuinely global is the working of a handful of large social processes of change that have effects in virtually every part of the globe. These mechanisms serve to convey causation rapidly throughout the globe -- sometimes with integrative effects and sometimes with the effect of creating new sources of conflict. International trade and investment, and the international institutions that support these, are the most obvious such processes. But the cultural interconnections that are facilitated by new technologies of communication, transportation, and entertainment represent another factor with global influence. The fact that people in virtually every country on the planet can interact in the blogosphere is one manifestation of the global reach of the internet. The fact that missionaries, revolutionaries, and executives can travel easily from Los Angeles to Seoul and La Paz is a token of the rapid transmission and diffusion of ideas. And the transmission of the carriers of violence and aggression is likewise a global phenomenon -- from Pakistan to London and from Washington to Baghdad. And the websites that serve as the nucleus of extremist groups demonstrate the global reach of small groups of violent activists.

Another source of global integration is the seriousness of the problems the world faces as a whole: climate change, new epidemic diseases, financial system insecurity, social violence, and warfare. Global warming and avian flu pandemic will plainly demonstrate interdependence -- even as these disasters will predictably have very different consequences in different parts of the world.

So there are real strands of social connection that justify us in saying the world is becoming more global. But still we might say that the language of globalization is sometimes overdone. It is true that there are significant international forces that operate to bring the peoples of the world into closer contact and interdependency. But it is also true that cultures, societies, and peoples are historically situated and particular. And if we are to understand these particular processes, we need to consider the particular social fabric in which they unfold.