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This chapter discusses the immediate background to the contemporary trade and human rights debate, focusing on the years from roughly the mid-1980s to the early 2000s. The chapter is structured in two sections. The first shows how the experience of trade liberalization in different countries and regions across the world in the 1980s and 1990s led to a variety of locally specific political struggles around trade across North America, Latin America, Western Europe, and parts of Asia and Africa. It also shows how, from the middle of the 1990s to around 2001, these local political struggles came together as part of a broader movement against neoliberal economic globalization, and began to focus their critical attention on the World Trade Organization (WTO). The second section then describes the social construction of trade as a human rights issue. It illustrates the way that some of the NGOs within this movement began to use human rights language as a way of framing and articulating their criticisms of trade liberalization and international trade law. It also asks why it was that human rights seemed, to many within the global justice movement, to be a useful language of resistance to what they saw as a global neoliberal economic agenda, and why it came to be adopted as such.

This chapter looks at recent developments in neo-Marxist theory, especially those varieties of Marxism that have, intentionally or inadvertently, introduced more pluralistic or neopluralistic factors into the analysis. The main focus is on the version of neo-Marxism that looks at the “rescaling of statehood,” that is, those authors who have addressed the problem of globalization by analyzing altered playing fields of various kinds; what has been called the search for a new spatiotemporal fix for capitalism. This version, and other versions, too, bring further into question some of the basic problems of the theory of capitalism itself, especially the Marxist version of the labor theory of value. Marxism may have been out of fashion in the late 20th century and often ignored by academics, but the financial crisis and recession of 2008-2009 revived interest in alternatives to neoliberal globalization. It is argued that basic flaws in the Marxist critique continue to make such attempts problematic.

This introductory chapter lays out the high stakes of rethinking immigration in our twenty-first century of migration crises, resurgent racist nationalisms, and the continued destabilization of countries in the Global South under globalization. It introduces a theory of conscription regarding immigration and historicizes the ways in which the United Kingdom, France, Italy, the United States, and other powers produced the migration that they attempt to police at their borders. Through global economic, political, and cultural processes from the era of high imperialism, decolonization, the cold war, to contemporary neoliberal globalization (neocolonialism), they have devastated nations in the Global South, creating instability and displacement. This chapter introduces migritude cultural production, often challenging these conscripting forces, and close reads Abu Bakr Khaal’s novella African Titanics.

This book is about the dynamics of neoliberal globalization in Cairo. It originated in questions that an international cohort of scholars raised in the late 1990s, when the power of globalization dramatically met resistance. The governance, technocratic politics, and planning in Cairo are discussed. Several chapters in this volume argue that the Egyptian state's fear and suspicion of the political participation and collective organization of its citizens leads the regime to devalue and weaken municipal governance and instead to view city issues, projects, policies, and services as the terrain of national bureaucratic actors. Additionally, several chapters tell the opposite story — of residents fighting back successfully and contesting forced “removals” or demolition orders after they block roads and bulldozers, talk to reporters, seek redress in the courts, or solicit support for their resistance from NGOs, political parties, celebrities, important political leaders, and even ministers. It also describes the meta-narratives, counter-narratives, modernist planning, and vernacular cosmopolitanism.

This chapter examines the pathways that tie the neoliberal phase of global capitalism to patterns of health and illness. It explores the phases of financial liberalization and the health impact of structural adjustment programs in LMICs following the 1980s debt crisis, as well as the austerity agenda in HICs since the 2008 onset of global financial and economic crises. It discusses the: World Trade Organization and the contemporary trade and investment regime; influence of corporate interests on new bilateral and regional agreements; implications of illicit financial flows for foregone social spending on health, and impact of transnational corporations on health, work conditions, and human rights. Also analyzed are the effects of neoliberal globalization on labor markets in terms of outsourced, precarious, and hazardous employment and the ratcheting down of labor standards and occupational safety and health. The final section highlights ongoing government resistance and social struggles against neoliberal globalization.

This chapter analyses the connections between Donald Trump and Brexit, particularly the role and nature of globalisation and related economic changes, asking how a socially progressive form of globalisation might respond to the challenges laid down by these two seismic political victories. The results of the UK's referendum on EU membership and the US presidential election in 2016 have caused many commentators to re-evaluate the assumptions of neoliberal globalisation. Trump's election, in particular, poses a challenge not only to neoliberal economics, but also to liberal democratic politics and the rule of law — both domestically and internationally. The chapter then argues for an alternative vision to that of neoliberal globalisation on the one hand, and a resort to reactionary nationalism on the other: a clear commitment to tackle the gross inequalities that have characterised the period of neoliberal globalisation and to work towards socially just forms of global governance.

This book explores the labor experiences of immigrant women, primarily Asians and Latinas, engaged in low-wage work in the era of neoliberal globalization. It assesses the impact of neoliberal globalization on the economic, political, and social lives of immigrant women both at home and abroad, as well as the strategies used by these women to deal with labor disruptions—interruptions in immigrant women's labor patterns due to the social and political processes resulting from neoliberal globalization. Labor disruptions encompass both “for-pay” labor and gendered labor within the family and occur in ethnic enclaves and within the informal economy. The book seeks to elucidate how Asian and Latina immigrant women, with the assistance of community-based organizations, organize and mobilize against disruptions caused by neoliberal globalization and the neoliberal state. This introduction reflects on the challenges facing future scholars of labor and migration processes.

This chapter expands the study of new African diasporic writing beyond Francophone and Anglophone worlds, to important works of African migrant literature in Italy written in Italian. It engages important historical moments including Italian colonialism, the Cold War, neoliberal economic globalization, and the ways in which these destructive histories create destabilization and thus African emigration. The chapter analyzes Somalia as a case study and engages with digital art and documentary film in contemporary Italy as important markers of Afro-Italian migrant cultural production. Through a close reading of Cristina Ali Farah’s novel Little Mother, it delineates not only the pasts of Italian colonialism on the continent, but the ways in which colonial racialized modes of managing movement appear in present-day Italy, particularly since the 1980s.

This chapter investigates the role of the nation-state in the cultural industries and the Korean Wave in the context of the broader social structure of society amid neoliberal globalization. It articulates how the Korean government has developed the cultural industries and the ways in which the government has cultivated its cultural policies in global trade, such as export promotion, direct and indirect export subsidies and supports, and the promotion of the nation's cultural image abroad. It especially analyzes whether neoliberal ideologies, emphasizing a small government regime, have completely altered state interventionism, known as developmentalism, in the Korean Wave, leading to further discussion of the role of the nation-state. The chapter historicizes the Korean Wave phenomenon according to major policy shifts surrounding media ecology, driving the change and continuity of Hallyu over the past eighteen years.

This chapter explores the ideological foundations of a particular paradigm in the sociolinguistics of English, that of “world Englishes” (or “WE”), within theoretical and political contexts. It demonstrates how WE, with special reference to the case of “Philippine English,” is sustained by a particular discourse of postcoloniality, one that is markedly postcolonial in spirit and form but, on historical and sociopolitical grounds, is ideologically conservative and dangerously complicit with recent ideas and practices of neoliberal globalization, the source of hotly contested debates because of its connection with rising global inequalities and fundamentalisms.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the varying degrees of skepticism over the existence of globalization, and then turns to conflicting interpretations of the impact of globalization upon national sovereignty. Studies have shown that under neoliberal globalization, the role of the state has shifted from representing domestic populations and economies to facilitating the mobility of capital, and this book isolates the specific consequences and implications of this shift in the case of St. Lucia.

This chapter focuses on sources of insecurity rooted in globalization, global interdependence, as well as political and economic inequalities on a global scale. It shows how neoliberal globalization has resulted in the expansion of informalization, particularly in conflict zones. These processes of informalization are gendered and are linked to processes of economic exploitation and political militarization that divide the globe. The chapter also draws out the connections between criminal and conflict economies at the local and macrolevel, highlighting the many ways in which the global trade in drugs, arms, and commodities such as gold, diamonds, and copper supports and is supported by violence.

This chapter discusses the two key elements of Vía Campesina's resistance to neoliberal globalization. Neoliberal globalization is considered to be the successful building of unity within diversity, and the deeply political act of articulating a peasant identity. The chapter begins by briefly introducing La Vía Campesina, and continues with an examination of the factors that contributed to the rise, consolidation, and global articulation of this growing rural movement.

This introductory chapter discusses alter-globalization movements in the late 1990s, criticizing the commonly held belief that neoliberal globalization would hollow out trade unions, undermine state protections, and place national working classes in competition with one another for scarce jobs. This movement questioned the supposed fixity of labor within the national context, and asserted that unions are forging a new frontier within an old tradition—global unions for the global age. Given that scholars have overlooked many details regarding the increasing tendency of labor politics to “go global,” the book examines how transnational campaigns empower or inspire local movements. In addition, the campaigns studied are inspired by global priorities and yet have empowered local struggles.

This chapter reviews a number of financial crises experienced in the first wave of globalization in Central Europe, the United States, Argentina, the far East, the deglobalization period of the interwar years featuring hyperinflation, stock market crash, massive bank failures, the great depression and the rise of fascism and Nazism, the years of steady growth, lower inequality and financial stability under the Bretton Woods system, and the application of neoliberal globalization and its sequels of financial crisis in Latin America, the US, Europe, East Asia and in other nations, the sharp rise of inequality, the formation of strong economic elites and fragmentation of the middle class, and the decline of labor. The chapter draws lessons from these episodes and highlights serious pitfalls in the conceptual frameworks and operational practices of the IMF and the central banks that kept these institutions from playing a useful role in preventing and/or recovering from financial crises.

This chapter investigates how neoliberal globalization is not just an economic concept or an economic condition; rather, it brings with it shifts in the spheres of culture psychology and identity. It specifically analyzes how personality and assessment tests and cross-cultural workshops on identity and difference that are primarily developed from Euro-American psychology are utilized in the Indian information technology and call center industry. The cross-cultural framework developed primarily by Western psychologists provided the most important tools, concepts, and vocabularies to understand “culture” in cultural sensitivity workshops and extended training seminars held for offshore companies, such as in India. These workshops promoted highly reified ideas about culture in which Indian work culture was viewed as inefficient, hierarchical, feudal, and indirect, whereas European culture was framed as egalitarian, professional, assertive, and non-hierarchical. This chapter reveals how neoliberal psychological discourses of self, identity, and happiness are becoming a mainstay of Indian culture and society.

Maybe it’s possible to explain the discursive cultural framework within a context of difference and collectivity, “difference” being the key word that defines our time and “collectivity” being the thing that is so hard to achieve while frequently being so longed for. We have to negotiate and recognize difference and collectivity simultaneously. It is an aspect of social consciousness that is exemplified in the art context. Difference and collectivity as social definitions and processes of recognition feed from the examples of modern and ​contemporary art. Art is nurtured and encouraged in return via cultural permission to be the space for what cannot be tolerated but can be accommodated under the conditions of neoliberal globalization.