James Mittelman

• American University

Educational globalization is taking place amid the competing narratives of hyperglobalization and deglobalization. This article shows that these narratives fail to capture what is really happening. Aggregate empirical data for the period since the 2008 financial crisis evidence neither an appreciable rise nor a substantial decline in the overall le...

This exploratory case study of repositioning focuses on changing relations among actors and the structures of global governance. It examines interactions between formal institutions, particularly the IMF, and informal networks of authority manifested in global forums, such as the G7/G8 and G20. The core argument is that global repositioning may be...

So as to advance understanding of global governance, one can pick up on Robert Cox's critical formulations. Best known for his insights on the interplay of material conditions, institutions, and ideas, he later developed his framework by giving greater weight to the ideational dimensions of intersubjectivity. Yet it is usually deployed with regard...

To probe the changing roles and responsibilities of intellectuals, this article explores the world of Ali Mazrui, one of Africa’s best-known scholars. Mazrui’s lifelong work spans the entire postcolonial period, and offers a prism for viewing African studies. Methodologically, this intellectual ethnography stages dialogues between Mazrui and other...

Contemporary globalisation is characterised by an explosion of organisational pluralism. Acronyms such as brics (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), ibsa (India, Brazil and South Africa), and basic (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) abound. This proliferation of groupings signals a repositioning within global governance and their n...

Global university rankings denominate values. While the rankings, like other currencies, do not have intrinsic worth, the values that constitute them are substantial. So, too, rankings are measures, and a critical issue is what they measure and do not measure: that which is highly valued, undervalued and devalued. Universities employ these instrume...

The conjunctural issues marking our hard times are linked to the longue durée in a constellation called hyperconflict.1 To introduce this concept, I want to highlight common dimensions of three emblematic concerns that have grabbed public attention – oil spills, debt, and bailouts. This probing will help frame analytical questions and encapsulate m...

Enigmatically, the incidence of deadly armed conflict on a world basis is declining, or at least remaining level, amid a prevailing, if not heightened, atmosphere of insecurity. The explanation for the correlation of more peace and less security lies in the rise of ‘hyperconflict.’ The prefix ‘hyper’ suggests excessive: in excess of plausible advan...

In our troubled times, dominant discourses about crisis have muddled its underlying dynamics. To refocus, analysis explicates the ideological effects of the narratives that accompany surges in militarization and financial securitization. It is argued that money in the form of military spending and finance, prevailing storylines about them, and inte...

Four analytical frames link globalizing processes and Iraqi statehood: national security, the 'failed' state, oil resources, and military globalization. As conjured by US government officials and intellectuals, these discourses are used to explicate state-building and justify the occupation of Iraq. The representations are a system of both compleme...

While the salience of race is rising in public discourse, the dominant knowledge structure in international studies has deflected this issue. A look at curriculum and research programs suggests that the transnational dimensions of race are sidelined. The core concept of state sovereignty rarely opens to questions of race. Yet there is a longstandin...

More subtle than the manifestations of poverty are the paradigmatic means of sustaining, deepening or lessening it. Indeed, dominant knowledge structures are insinuated in policy making and conventional anti-poverty measures, some of which reflect the poverty of the intellect. Ensconced in distinctive contexts, poverty itself is shaped by the templ...

The following remarks were delivered at a plenary session on 19 October 2007 in New York City at the 50 th meeting of the African Studies Association. This was, for an ASA, an extremely animated plenary attended by over 400. The question and answer session that followed indicated the huge concern of all those present. For instance, one suggested th...

How can a developing country capture the advantages of globalization? In grappling with this question, China has played to its strengths and picked itself up by the bootstraps, though not without mounting signs of apprehension. This case offers clues to what vaults development forward in globalization. Largely overlooked in this search for a key is...

Resistance is not only a response to, but also an integral component of neoliberal globalization. Public debates and most scholarly discourse have focused on macroresistance, which signals a new dynamic in globalization, but to the neglect of microresistance. Macroresistance may be best grasped as a political intervention by a coalition of heteroge...

From a critical perspective, precisely what kind of knowledge about globalization is meaningful? The distinctive province of a critical orientation to globalization is coming to be defined by a complex of five interacting components: reflexivity, historicism, decentering, crossovers between social inquiry and other streams of knowledge, and an emph...

Common sense about globalization protests is embodied in media representations, aided by public intellectuals, and imported into the classroom. Survey research demonstrates that the template of representations is partially accurate and partly misleading. The protesters’ perspectives show considerable complexity, and indicate a selective rejection o...

International Studies is on the cusp of a debate between para-keepers, observers who are steadfast about maintaining the prevailing paradigms and deny that globalization offers a fresh way of thinking about the world, and para-makers, who bring into question what they regard as outmoded categories and claim to have shifted to an innovatory paradigm...

As a form of restructuring with new winners and losers, globalisation begets resistance, and these processes occur in particular places that have distinctive features. A map of globalisation may be drawn by showing the spaces of resistance, many of which are found at the local level, sometimes with transnational links involving formal or informal n...

Globalization studies are not really global. Rather, globalization research mainly centres on, and emanates from, the OECD countries. To begin to change the balance, it is important to pose a set of pertinent and penetrating research questions. Animated by theoretical and empirical research undertaken largely in southeast Asia, these questions call...

Assessments of resistance to globalization are necessarily influenced by the manner in which one conceptualizes these processes. Too often, both of the terms (‘resistance’ and ‘globalization’) are used promiscuously, the latter as a buzzword or catchall and the former in many different ways, sometimes as a synonym for challenges, protests, intransi...

Assessments of resistance to globalization are necessarily influenced by the manner in which one conceptualizes these processes. Too often, both terms are used promiscuously, the former as a buzzword or catchall and the latter in many different ways, sometimes as a synonym for challenges, protests, intransigence or even evasions. Hence, we seek to...

Based on extensive fieldwork in Eastern Asia, an epicentre of globalisation, and Southern Africa, a key node in the most marginalised continent, this cross-regional study asks: what constitutes resistance to neoliberal globalisation? An ecological reading of master theorists of resistance, especially Polanyi, focuses attention on protectionist move...

Administration, Staff, Students, and Workers, It gives me great pleasure to be with you tonight. I thank you for inviting me to give this annual memorial lecture.

Saudi Arabia’s royal family is trying to spearhead an advanced industrial economy while inoculating against a social upheaval. Given the surge in the price of oil from about $3.50 a barrel in 1973 to a peak of $34 in 1981 and 1982, billions of petro-dollars were made available to plough back into development projects and private industry. The sum a...

Years ago, an African reminded fellow diplomats of the practical limitations of the UN in dealing with conflicts which the contestants do not wish to resolve: ‘When there is a dispute between small countries,’ he said, ‘the dispute in question disappears. When there is a dispute between a large country and a small country, the small country disappe...

The Acholi, a Nilotic people in northern Uganda, are wedged in a stretch between Zaire, Sudan and Kenya. The standard maps do not identify their locale as Acholi-land. I (JHM) first encountered them when a fellow student invited me to his home, a mud-thatched hut, one among many surrounded by a makeshift thicket fence erected to keep out intruders,...

When an acquaintance in Dar es Salaam invited me (JHM) to visit her family in an ujamaa (communal) village, I jumped at the opportunity. Hemmed in by the Indian Ocean on one side and groves of mango trees, coconut palms, jackfruit (which resemble large basketballs) and the infamous durian plant, with its succulent pulp of fine flavour but skunk-lik...

Shortly after independence in 1975, a Marxist government in Mozambique sought to loosen its ties to South Africa’s apartheid system. Mozambique approached transnational corporations in the USA and Western Europe to do business. Their reply was: sorry, chum, you must deal with our regional affiliate (which is in Johannesburg). Even today, if a paren...

On the conventional route’s high speed track, only the more daring have managed to navigate the main thoroughfare. Fast-tracking runs greater risk of collision, but also offers the passengers greater rewards, at least in the short term, should they survive the deadly traffic. Both dismal failures and spectacular successes have been recorded.

From listening to commentators on television and reading the newspapers, you may have the impression that many, if not most, non oil-exporting Third World countries are mired in poverty, ignorance, superstition, hopelessness and underdevelopment. Nowadays the media frequently refer to such countries as Bangladesh and Haiti as ‘basket cases’. Some o...

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China, like many underdeveloped countries, has sought to industrialize and to sell more of its manufactured products overseas. Once isolationist, China is now one of the world’s 10 largest trading nations, enjoying a surplus of nearly $25 billion dollars with the USA alone (which puts China second only to J...

Formulating a strategy of development requires looking back over the trails Third World countries have already trod in their quest to accumulate capital. The real choices in the current global political economy are quite limited. One is to join the lane of traffic headed for capitalist development. (Tracks 1 and 2 distinguish the different conditio...

Following its decline in theory and practice in the 1970s, regionalism both revived and changed dramatically in the 1980s, and has gained strength in the 1990s. Regionalism today is emerging as a potent force in the global restructuring of power and production.

This paper contends that world society is entering a new era in the relationship between power and the division of labour, which is globalised. What sets the context for conflict and cooperation in the post-Cold War period is an integrating and yet disintegrating process known as globalisation. In developing this argument, it will first explore var...

Who has the right and responsibility to determine the content of education about foreign affairs? Should the Department of Education (DOE) seek to influence what the schools and universities teach? These questions are the subject of a smoldering debate sparked by the regional office of the DOE in Denver, Colorado. Answers to them would tell us a gr...

Shortly after independence in 1975, a Marxist government in Mozambique sought to loosen its ties to South Africa’s apartheid system. Mozambique approached multinational corporations in the US and Western Europe to do business. Their reply was: sorry, chum, you must deal with our regional affiliate (which is in Johannesburg). Even today, if a parent...

Formulating a strategy of development requires looking back over the trails Third World countries have already trod in their quest to accumulate capital. The real choices in the current world system are quite limited. One is to join the lane of traffic headed for capitalist development. A second is to leave the mainstream and aim for another destin...

In recent years, the People’s Republic of China, like many underdeveloped countries, has sought to industrialize and to sell more of its manufactured products overseas. Thus China’s exports of textiles to the US increased dramatically after 1980, reaching a value of $500 million in 1982, when the US was mired in a severe recession. With American te...

Years ago, an African reminded fellow diplomats of the practical limitations of the UN in dealing with conflicts which the contestants do not wish to resolve: ‘When there is a dispute between small countries,’ he said, ‘the dispute in question disappears. When there is a dispute between a large country and a small country, the small country disappe...

The Acholi, a Nilotic people in northern Uganda, are wedged in a stretch between Zaire, Sudan and Kenya. The standard maps do not identify their locale as Acholi-land. I first encountered them when a fellow student invited me to his home, a mud-thatched hut, one among many surrounded by a makeshift thicket fence erected to keep out intruders, human...

When an acquaintance in Dar es Salaam invited me to visit her family in an ujamaa (communal) village, I jumped at the opportunity. Hemmed in by the Indian Ocean on one side and groves of mango trees, coconut palms, jackfruit (which resemble large basketballs) and the infamous durian plant, with its succulent pulp of fine flavour but skunk-like smel...

Saudi Arabia’s royal family is trying to spearhead an advanced industrial economy while inoculating against a social upheaval. Given the surge in the price of oil from about $3.50 a barrel in 1973 to a peak of $34 in 1981 and 1982, billions of petro-dollars have been available to plough back into development projects and private industry. The sum a...

From listening to commentators on television and reading the newspapers, you may have the impression that many, if not most, nonoil-exporting Third World countries are in the position of a castrated man in a harem: impotent and unable to do anything about their incapacity. Nowadays the media frequently refer to such countries as Bangladesh and Hait...

The promise and limitations of the much discussed development strategy of self-reliance are exemplified in Mozambique, whose program for initiating a transition to socialism centers on creating new party and state organs, hastening rural transformation, promoting heavy industry, and restructuring links with the international economy. The major obst...

Paul Sweezy takes on the difficult task of explaining class struggles in Portugal ( Monthly Review, September and October 1975). It is indeed a formidable challenge to come up with explanations of the underlying social and economic patterns that gave rise to the whirlwind political events there. Between the coup of April 25, 1974, and the president...

Globalization is not only about material power, but also constitutes, and is constituted by, ways of interpreting and representing the world. An appreciation of the subjective dimensions of power-knowledge and ideology-can help identify the path to alter a form of globalization guided by values that produce great prosperity for some and marginaliza...

This book addresses two questions that are crucial to the human condition in the twenty-first century: does globalization promote security or fuel insecurity? And what are the implications for world order? Coming to grips with these matters requires building a bridge between the geoeconomics and geopolitics of globalization, one that extends to the...