Against ‘Globalization from Above’: Critical Geopolitics and the World Order Models Project

Abstract

In the last decade numerous arguments have been developed in critical geopolitics concerning the limitations of conventional spatialities of global politics. These themes have raised numerous questions about how one might work to reimagine global politics. One source of reimaginings has been the World Order Models Project (WOMP). For the last three decades WOMP has developed models of desirable futures for a global polity of humane governance most recently posited as an alternative to current processes of ‘globalization from above’. By engaging with activists in social movements over the 1980s and 1990s on peace, justice, and environmental matters, the scholars of the project have developed a series of ‘world order values’ to guide normative considerations of global politics. I suggest, after my reading these documents in the light of contemporary writing in critical geopolitics, that by thinking ethically about politics in the 1990s one may further challenge the geographical assumptions about place and sovereignty and the related conceptual tools brought to notions of alternative politics. The recent WOMP arguments suggest that ‘alternative politics’ is about more than resistance, social movements, and states. These arguments also show in a number of ways that critical geopolitics is about connections and community understood as other than place-bound political entities.