Critical Globalization Studies Research Articles

Singapore, City of the Future

In the context of critical global media studies, this article demonstrates how Western visual-aesthetic registers can invisibilize an existing place and its inhabitants through the uncritical celebration of its imagined futures. Taking Singapore as a case study, the article focuses on two sites of mediatization: the 2018 National Geographic documentary feature, City of the Future: Singapore, and 2019–20 media reports on the filming of HBO’s Westworld in Singapore. It argues that these media artifacts employ the trope of allochronic futurity: a denial of coevalness that seeks recourse in a future time-outside-time. This media trope is produced and sustained by two kinds of registers—a discursive register and a visual-aesthetic register—that inform promotional mediatized genres. While the promotional genres and discourses analyzed here construct Singapore’s distinctiveness, the visual-aesthetic register renders Singapore generic in its visualized futuristic-ness.

Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History

Medical Cultures, Therapeutic Properties, and Laws in Global History

Na styku rozwoju, niepełnosprawności i teorii postkolonialnej. Czy osoby niepełnosprawne są marginalizowane wśród osób marginalizowanych?

While inequalities and injustices originating from the social categorisations of race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, or nationality seem to be a general focus of both development and postcolonial discourses, the issue of disability seems to be rather overshadowed. Therefore, since even the World Health Organisation (WHO) itself and its Mental Health Improvements for Nations Development (MIND) project represents disability as a barrier to development – so as a factor globally contributing to poverty, inequality, and injustice and not the other way around – there is a need to extend our attention when investigating exploiting and disempowering power relations inherent in the 21st century that aim at eliminating human differences. The present theoretical inquiry concentrates thus on emphasising a call for bringing together the disability and postcolonial debates in the investigation of social-justice-based development and the role education might in general play in the realisation of just societies and the equality of all individuals around the world. The paper starts by shortly introducing the concepts of development, disability, and postcolonial theory, and then aims at accentuating the need of a critical global disability studies for the sake of decolonising current practices and making present, marginalised, and disaccredited knowledges of a complex and heterogeneous disability experience. Finally, the paper highlights that a decolonised understanding of disability should be inherent in present educational agendas – integral to development processes – because human differences should not be factors that impoverish but that empower human relationships.

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

Eating Korean in America: Gastronomic Ethnography of Authenticity

The global food system, agro-industrialization and governance: alternative conceptions for sub-Saharan Africa

ABSTRACT Global food security challenges give rise to contentious debates. Conventional approaches to agricultural development call for capital-intensive industrial-scale farming to increase global productivity. Sub-Saharan Africa is the main target for agro-industrial farmland investments. Critical scholars oppose these trends in the region, arguing that the large-scale farming model causes a devastating loss of land resources and harms rural livelihoods. Critical development scholars and critical globalization scholars generally intersect in their candid rejection of global capitalism and the commodification of agri-food resources. This paper adds to existing critiques by advancing a governance approach. In reviewing case study evidence from eight countries, it highlights the crucial role of governments, who ultimately wield sovereign authority to regulate the agricultural sector. This analysis represents a fusion of critical development studies and critical globalization studies. Rather than rejecting the global capitalist system, it sheds light on the need for effective regulation and identifies key actors and policy areas.

Food sovereignty and neo-extractivism: limits and possibilities of an alternative development model

ABSTRACT Food sovereignty and neo-extractivism are two highly contentious concepts that have emerged in the development studies literature and as development alternatives pursued predominantly by governments in Latin America. This paper engages with both Critical Development Studies (CDS) and Critical Globalization Studies (CGS) to analyze the dynamics of this post-neoliberal model in Bolivia, providing insights into the convergences and contradictions of neo-extractivism and food sovereignty. Rather than challenging or transforming the neoliberal model of development, it is argued that the post-neoliberal model has been used strategically by states to gain and maintain legitimacy while facilitating and even exacerbating exploitative forms of extractivism for the accumulation of wealth and power. This has been possible, in part, due to the contradictory class positions that have materialized as the rural poor are increasingly dependent upon, and adversely incorporated into, new ‘modes of extraction’.

Soap

Anthropology has long grappled with the politics of critique. In critical global health studies, an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, ethnographers negotiate relations and transactions in the field that pivot around boundaries at the core of our disciplinary practice: inside/outside, critique/complicity, theoretical/applied. Yet, while critique is a primary endeavor of the anthropologist, few have explicitly analyzed or reflected on its meanings, valences, affects, and entailments, particularly amid the rise of global health and the NGOization of the global South that inflects much of our work. In this essay, I reflect on the state of critique in critical global health studies, sketching its gestures, rhetoric, and intentions. Then, I trace some of the journeys of the bar of soap pictured below, an object that touched me in many senses of the term by intersecting, facilitating, and holding my anthropological interest for over a decade. Finally, drawing on recent feminist science studies scholarship, I suggest that critique, as entangled and entangling practice, is a form of care that might productively reframe anthropologists’ normative aspirations to ‘usefulness’ or ‘relevance’.

Introduction

As an emerging subfield of medical anthropology with roots in histories and geographies of colonial and international health, critical global health studies reflects both changing modes of health practice and the centering of critique as a core anthropological endeavor. This special section seeks to analyze and reflect on the meanings, valences, affects, and entailments of anthropological critique, taking the rise of global health and flourishing of global health ethnography as key sites of investigation. Each of the contributing pieces is oriented around a global health object or technology.

Toward a Feminist Turn

Toward a Feminist Turn Krista Comer (bio) With minor editing for publication, I have let this piece stand largely as it was delivered in 2015. It seemed fitting, however, to amend a postscript. There I reflect on what I learned from the reception of this talk and others like it that I gave shortly afterward. The intervening presidential election of 2016, and the new worldwide feminist resistance set in motion by it, offer one answer to a central question posed here: What will it take to bring feminism out of the shadows? The need for less “stuck” and predictable conversations about feminism is a priority. The times call out to all feminist killjoys! —K.C. The charge of this genealogical plenary is an “anniversary charge,” to take the long view and ask ourselves: What critical works and theoretical approaches have been important to the field of western American literary and culture study, what is important currently, and what could or should we do in the future? Those questions ask us to think about but also beyond the Western Literature Association as an organizational and intellectual enterprise. My own interests are in feminist thought, and I make several claims. One is that it would benefit scholarship in US West studies to put feminism on the agenda not only of this fiftieth anniversary conference but especially of the future agenda of western studies. Feminist thought as feminist thought is not much on the table these days, and this is not a western studies phenomenon exclusively (American studies, for all its innovations, shares similar limits). Feminism’s embattlement no doubt is a sign of the postfeminist times in which we live and the chilling effect of postfeminism on political climates, including in universities. Doing feminist work, making the case for it, has gotten harder. Embattlement also owes to the complexities of feminist theory itself and its own genealogical quandaries and theoretical paradoxes. For example, is working [End Page 11] on “women” as opposed to “gender” theoretically naïve? That is a question, one we don’t take up in western literary studies much since “women” is usually taken for granted. I too invest in “women” as an ongoing profound social and ontological category, but, in contexts of feminist studies, one must make a case. As postfeminism lives into what looks like a third decade, many feminists ask anew in what relation we situate our work, or ourselves, to feminist studies as a field, or to explicitly feminist epistemologies? If we work on women, do we do so as feminists or as scholars of feminist studies as a discipline, or as critical race feminists, Indigenous feminists, material feminists, and what differences, in which contexts, do such distinctions make? What about feminist thought in relation to queer and/or transtheory, to studies in gender, or to masculinity? Obviously in fifty years Americanist literary scholarship has seen a lot of critical turns, and scholarship on the West tracks in relation to them. Most of us will know recent major turns—toward “theory” and poetics, and an expansion of materials considered legitimate evidence, including popular culture and literature, diaries, visual culture; toward race and gender as analytics; toward the sociality of space; toward the transnational / hemispheric / critical regional; and recently, the turn toward comparative settler Wests, trans-Indigeneity and an ethics of refusal, and queer dwellings and rurality. Feminist work on the West has been entangled in all of them, as have “they” been entangled in and often brought about by the innovations of feminisms, including especially the work of women of color feminism and, in a related but distinct category, the work of Indigenous women and Indigenous feminism. I want to gesture to the arc of that work and urge an invigoration of explicitly feminist thinking, even a feminist turn. The reasons to do this seem obvious. A “feminist turn” would transform studies of the West by moving in feminist directions the fields in which West study is embedded and embattled: Indigenous studies, settler theory, border theory, transnational and critical global studies, cultural geography and space/place studies. These fields have feminists in them, and yet as fields they don’t articulate themselves through feminist studies...

Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja

Reviewed by: Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire and the Government of Species by Neel Ahuja Claire Laurier Decoteau (bio) Bioinsecurities: Disease Interventions, Empire and the Government of Species. By Neel Ahuja. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016. Pp. 288. $24.95. Neel Ahuja's Bioinsecurities expertly weaves together a series of historical cases to provide evidence of his analysis that the international policing of interspecies relations is a central feature of the biopolitical governmentality of empire. As such, he brings together critical posthumanism, bio/necropolitics, and global studies of empire. While this particular theoretical fusion defines the book series in which Bioinsecurities is featured, Ahuja's contribution to this field is unique. In the name of disease control and health security, empires (and in this book, the U.S. empire in particular) have defended not only the boundaries of a nationalized biopolitical community but an idealized, autonomous human body. As Foucault argued so cogently, race (and the defense of the racialized species body) is how death is inscribed within the biopolitical operations of the state (2003). Ahuja argues that the construction and protection of the white, settler body motivates the militarized "government of species." Ahuja explains: "Disease interventions at the borders of expanding US influence deployed models of territorial warfare to defend the body in space, but also transformed the [End Page 480] body's actual biological processes into a site of management and optimization using advanced biosciences and animal research subjects" (p. 5). The racialized fear of infectious disease and interspecies interpenetration propels the investment in technological interventions aimed at optimization, purification, and the remaking of life itself—an affective, temporal process Ahuja labels "dread life." Ahuja's historical cases are well chosen and illustrate various features of the government of species. Chapter 1 argues that the management of Hansen's disease reflects broader imperial imperatives for the annexation and incorporation of Hawai'i. The desire to contain and control disease through quarantine was part and parcel of the United States' imperial agenda, but it worked in tension with its own "exceptionalist myth" of a "benevolent" (p. 19) and civilizing empire, thus instigating a shift from segregation to contingent incorporation (a form of exclusionary inclusion). Chapter 2 discusses the gendered control of venereal disease in the Panama Canal Zone during the world wars. Rather than quarantine, here we see the militarized production of sanitized zones in which soldiers could operate free of disease. Ahuja labels this a "medicalized state of war" in which soldiers could move disease-free across the borders of occupation once local women's sexualities were policed and controlled, thereby transplanting the boundary of occupation onto the very bodies of local women. In Chapter 3, Ahuja explores the trade and sale of rhesus macaques for the development of the polio vaccine. He argues that the development of high-tech pharmaceuticals facilitated a move away from large-scale military projects to eradicate disease toward the micro-politics associated with attuning the bodies' internal systems—thus eradicating the need to control the environment in order to safeguard the survival of the species (p. 103). And yet, the procurement of monkeys for research and vivisection relied upon colonial relations and as those were destabilized, the United States was forced to domesticate primate research. As a result, the monkey became a cultural figure, representing scientific progress and a shared kinship. Chapter 4 explores how fears of weaponized smallpox became the rationale and justification for the invasion of Iraq because it capitalized upon dormant fears of the reemergence of the only fully eradicated disease in human history. Ironically, these fears were ignited by a resurrection of the mythic "vanishing American Indian" and the role genocidal disease played in U.S. colonial settler history. The return of smallpox, Ahuja argues, reflected anxieties about the "changing territorializations of US empire" (p. 134) in the post-Soviet era, where the "Islamic terrorist" is imagined as ubiquitous and uncontrollable. Chapter 5 analyzes the confinement of HIV-infected Haitian refugees at Guantánamo Bay from 1991–94. Ahuja argues that the exceptional carceral control of populations in the name of global health is part and parcel of a liberal, humanitarian logic of "relief" (170). [End Page 481...

Globalizing Eighteenth-Century Literary History (A View from 2016)

This Introduction argues for the ongoing relevance of “global” to eighteenth-century, postcolonial, and Comparative Literature scholarship. It assesses the development of critical global studies since the 2000s and calls for further linguistic, cultural, and geographic diversity and representation on eighteenth-century academic panels, in particular those sponsored by the Modern Languages Association. The five essays included in this Critical Conversation emerged from a roundtable panel on “Globalizing 18th-century Literary History” organized for the Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, 18th-Century Forum at the MLA Conference in Austin, 2016. Scholars from the fields of Arabic, Japanese, German, and African studies reflect on the states and stakes of translation, literary, and genre history from non-Anglo perspectives.

From Women's Struggles to Distorted Emancipation

This article develops a critical analysis of transformations of the idea and practice of women's emancipation in late-modern western society under the influence of globalizing advanced capitalism. It builds on analyses of feminist critical theory and critical globalization studies and argues that global capitalism initiates processes in which the practice of emancipation is distorted. Distorted emancipation refers to the social consequences of the marketization and commodification of areas of social life that were previously excluded from market relationships. Care practices, which have been a fundamental issue in women's emancipatory struggles, are used as a reference point. The article argues that even if commodification creates certain possibilities for financial rewards of care, it institutionalizes a double misrecognition of care as both nonproductive work and paid work that cannot be a source of social recognition. Furthermore, distorted emancipation makes positive moments of changing gender patterns available only for some groups of women in socioeconomically, geopolitically or culturally privileged positions. These positive moments are dependent on transnational care practices, which are understood as a manifestation of distorted emancipation.

Mismeasuring Humanity: Examining Indicators Through a Critical Global Studies Perspective

Abstract Social and economic indicators measure and monitor the relative level of each country’s “progress”, be this in education, poverty, mortality, gross domestic product and so on. This essay examines indicators in the contemporary development paradigm and their use by the United Nations, World Bank, NGOs and corporations, as well as their increasing presence in global governance decision-making. Drawing upon a critical global studies perspective, I argue that indicators are producing and privileging certain kinds of knowledge over other kinds of knowledge that may not be so easily “captured” by nationally structured numerical reductionism. Reflecting on the limitations of the Human Development Index and the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, I suggest that the empirical data produced ultimately mismeasure the fullness of human experience and often undervalue non-western worldviews. I conclude by returning to the insights suggested by a global studies perspective and offer a number of recommendations for envisaging and shaping a more inclusive post-development paradigm.

The Permanent People’s Tribunals and indigenous people’s struggles in Mexico: between coloniality and epistemic justice?

AbstractOn 21 October 2011, hundreds of Mexican civil society organizations formally submitted a petition to the Lelio e Lisli Basso Foundation in Rome to justify the opening of a Mexican Chapter of the Permanent People’s Tribunals (PPT). The PPT was established in 1979 as the successor to the Russell Tribunals on Vietnam (1966–1967) and on the Latin American Dictatorships (1974–1976). The PPT is considered an ethical non-governmental tribunal and their sessions are described as a mechanism for raising awareness of national and international public opinion on rights violations. This article investigates the potential of the PPT for contributing to epistemic justice in Mexico, by focusing on indigenous people communities’ long-term struggle for legal pluralism and autonomy. In so doing, it offers an analysis about the coloniality of international human rights law operating in non-governmental mechanisms of popular litigation such as the PPT; a perspective that has remained absent in critical international and global studies. In particular, the article argues that the PPT in Mexico is imbricated with Eurocentric modes of legal production but that it nonetheless has the potential to contribute, in a relevant but fragile way, to epistemic justice. On the one hand, it is observed that PPT key documents and statements explaining different forms of violence in Mexico emphasize causal relationships based on the all-encompassing power or logic of capitalism. This perspective, it is argued, has the effect of epistemic erasure: notions and practices of justice that exceed this logic are silenced in the process of legal translation for the construction of “model cases”. On the other hand, the article highlights the coexistence of different notions of justice in one of the PPT thematic hearings on Violence against Corn, food sovereignty and autonomy hold in Oaxaca, Mexico, to argue for a re-thinking of the monocultural state-centric legal frames that ground PPT legal qualification. As the PPT classify social grievances in legal terms through the lens/gaze of international law, this legal qualification works as an activity of “translation”, in some cases of incommensurable notions of justice or absence of justice, violence or well-being. The article concludes with an emphasis on the potential contributions of the PPT to epistemic justice as the political visibility of the many ways in which justice is understood and experienced despite the many forms of violence and oppression in contemporary Mexico.

Dealing with Disasters in an Age of Globalized Sentiment: Testing the Boundaries of the Cosmopolitan Ideal?

AbstractNatural disasters, such as the Japanese earthquake and tsunami of March 2011, have not only tested the fragility of the world capitalist system, but have asked questions of the ‘cosmopolitan ideal’ that underpins the discourse on global civil society prevalent in much literature on globalization. In this article I consider why the global response to such tragedies is markedly different to the more muted response to more overtly political tragedies, such as atrocities committed by states, and suggests that what it demonstrates is not a full cosmopolitanismper se, but a ‘selective cosmopolitanism’ grounded in a ‘de-politicization of feeling’. As a result, the political context of these natural disasters is often ignored and this calls for a repositioning of such disasters within a human rights framework and for an analysis of them informed by a critical globalization studies.

Global South to the Rescue: Emerging Humanitarian Superpowers and Globalizing Rescue Industries

The introductory essay offers a brief overview of current trends in critical globalization studies and international relations scholarship that shed light on three intersections: between imperialism and humanitarianism, between neoliberal globalization and “rescue industry” transnationalism, and between patterns of geopolitical hegemony and trajectories of peacekeeping internationalism. These research agendas have been generative and politically useful, but have tended to neglect the forms of humanitarian and peacekeeping agency emanating from the global south. In order to address this gap, this introduction lays out a new research agenda that combines interdisciplinary methods from global studies, gender and race studies, critical security studies, police and military sociology, Third World diplomatic history, and international relations. This introduction also theoretically situates the other contributions and case studies gathered here, providing a framework of analysis that groups them into three clusters: (I) Globalizing Peacekeeper Identities, (II) Assertive “Regional Internationalisms,” and (III) Emergent Alternative Paradigms. El ensayo introductorio ofrece una breve visión de las tendencias actuales dentro de los estudios críticos de globalización y las relaciones académicas internacionales que esclarecen tres intersecciones: entre el imperialismo y humanitarismo, entre la globalización neoliberal y “la industria de rescate” a través del transnacionalismo, y entre las normas de la hegemonía geopolítica y las trayectorias de mantenimiento de paz del internacionalismo. Estos programas de investigación han sido productiva y políticamente útiles, pero se inclinaron a olvidar las formas de la agencia humanitaria y de mantenimiento de la paz procedente del sur global. Para atender esta carencia, esta introducción presenta un nuevo programa de investigación que combina métodos interdisciplinarios de estudios globales, género y raza, seguridad crítica, sociología militar y policial, historia diplomática del tercer mundo, y relaciones internacionales. Esta introducción también sitúa teoréticamente a las demás contribuciones y estudios de casos reunidos aquí, que proveen un marco de análisis que los reúne dentro de tres grupos: (I) Identidades pacifistas globales, (II)”Internacionalismos regionales” asertivos y (III) Paradigmas de alternativos emergentes. 这篇导论文章简要回顾了批判性的全球化和国际关系研究当前的趋势，阐明了帝国主义与人道主义、新自由主义全球化与“救助行业”跨国主义、地缘政治霸权模式与维和国际主义轨迹之间的三个交集。这些研究议程有发展潜力，政治上也是有益的，但倾向于忽视产生于全球南方的不同形式的人道主义及维和力量。为填补这一鸿沟，这篇导论展示了一个新的研究议程，把全球研究、性别和种族研究、批判的安全研究、警察和军事社会学、第三世界外交史和国际关系学的跨学科诸方法连结了起来。本导论还在理论上设定了其他汇集于此的论文和案例研究的情境，提供了一个分析框架将其分为三组：（1）维和人员认同的全球化，（2）高度自信的“地区国际主义”和（3）可供选择的新兴范式。 소개글은 제국주의와 인도주의, 신자유주의 세계화와 “산업구제” 초국주의, 지정학적 헤게모니와 평화유지 국제주의 궤적이라는 세 가지 교차점에 대해서 시사점을 제공하는 비판적 세계화 연구와 국제관계 연구의 현재 경향에 대해서 간단하게 개관한다. 이러한 연구 의제들은 생성적이고 또한 정치적으로 유용하지만, 남반구의 인도주의 유형과 평화유지 기관들에 소홀한 경향이 있다. 이러한 갭을 다루기 위하여, 이 소개 글은 지구적 연구, 젠더와 인종 연구, 비판적 안보연구, 경찰과 군대 사회학, 제3세계 외교사와 국제관계 연구들에서 간학문적 연구방법들을 통합하는 새로운 연구의제를 제시한다. 또한 이 소개 글은 이번 호에 실린 다른 글들과 사례 연구들을 세 가지 덩어리로 묶는 분석틀을 제시하면서 이론적으로 위치지운다: (1) 평화유지 정체성의 세계화, (ii) 적극적 “지역 국제주의,” 그리고 (iii) 등장하는 대안적 패러다임.

The Hotel Bauen’s challenge to cannibalizing capitalism

Contemporary capitalist globalization, neoliberalism and corporatized tourism create a cultural pedagogy asserting that there is no alternative to these systems. Taking a critical stance, this article bridges critical globalization and tourism studies to offer one alternative model to challenge this cultural pedagogy. It does this through a case study of the Hotel Bauen of Buenos Aires, Argentina which was subject to a workers’ takeover in 2003. This case study offers us insights into how an enterprise can transform its internal operating environment and its external relations in profound ways to achieve important benefits for all stakeholders, but particularly the workers. The findings from this analysis challenge the assertion that there are no alternatives to a narrowly corporatized form of tourism.

Comment from the Field: Disability and the Majority World: Challenging Dominant Epistemologies

The one-day conference, held on 9 July 2010 at the Gaskell campus at Manchester Metropolitan University, successfully brought together academics, disability activists, researchers, and other stakeholders, to discuss and contribute to the often partial and fragmented debate around disability in the global South. More specifically, it sought to provide an open space for dialogue, and for the articulation and questioning of dominant epistemologies, to instead explore themes often bypassed, ignored, or rejected by Western disability studies; engaging alternative approaches to knowledge and its generation; challenging dominant epistemologies and exploring the possibilities of developing a Disability Studies that is both critical and global. My opening presentation, Intersections in Disability, Poverty and Development: A Global Disability Studies?, problematized some of the complexities in articulating a debate around disability, development, and poverty, highlighting how various gaps remain, bound to Western Disability Studies and epistemologies such as the social model, unequipped and even unwilling to engage with contextual, historical, economic, and many other critical aspects that differentiate the global South in its complex heterogeneity. I concluded that the exportation of Western epistemologies will not do, extending the call for a critical global Disability Studies that is interdisciplinary, open, questioning, and willing to learn and challenge ideas at its very core. Susan Buell from the University of East Anglia, in Social, Medical or Ch'alla?: The Poisoned Chalice of the Disability Professional, focused on people with a communication impairment in Bolivia to explore the experiences of families and the spaces where they find representation, support, and information. Buell, among other things, argued that the concept of the disability professional, within the Western social model context, continues to be enmeshed with that of the medical model in the exportation of knowledge. Overall, within dominant models of disability, specialist knowledge, she argued, is viewed as a poisoned chalice that is made so in practice by ignoring the value that skilled knowledge can contribute to breaking down barriers for families by providing support at the micro level, especially when professionals are willing to gain and share knowledge and to work with traditional systems. Alison Sheldon from the University of Leeds, in her presentation Locating Disability in the Majority World: Geography or Poverty?, adopted a materialist social model approach, and argued around/against the notion of a majority world as a separate space and a poverty within, as something different or separate from that in the West, drawing instead similarities between poverty in the global South and homeless people in the United Kingdom, stating that experiences of deprivation among other things are shared and operate on similar dynamics, and that in turn even open the spaces for relevance of Western theories. The next presentation, Rising to the Challenge of Inclusive Networking: Balancing Insider and Outsider Perspectives, by Susie Miles from the University of Manchester, introduced the Enabling Education Network (EENET), while reflecting on the meaning of inclusive education, highlighting the culturally determined nature of this concept. …

Critical Globalization Studies and the New Imperialism

In recent years, the concepts of imperialism, global capitalism, and capitalist empire have become increasingly relevant to critical globalization studies. Within the context of this discourse, this article explores whether or not contemporary society can be characterized as a new form of the Marxist notion of imperialism. In an attempt to answer this question, I employ Vladimir Lenin’s analysis of imperialism as it relates to contemporary capitalism. I test Lenin’s theories with a macroeconomic statistical analysis of existing data.

Critical Globalization Studies: An Empirical and Theoretical Analysis of the New Imperialism

Affirmative globalization studies stress positive aspects of global capitalism, while critical globalization studies use notions such as “Empire” and “new imperialism” to analyze the global economy's negativity. Critical globalization studies, however, frequently lack a precise theoretical notion of imperialism. This absence can be corrected by connecting the notion of a “new imperialism” to the classical theory of imperialism, as found in Lenin's canonical work. Empirical analysis of data from recent decades shows that Lenin's aspproach remains broadly correct, and that adaptation of his method to new realities strengthens the theoretical foundation of recent work on global capitalism.