Drishtikone
Here is the next one in my series on Globalization.
In my last post, I had discussed the way to handle globalization mechnisms and how globalization process has often been used by various forces to their benefit!
Here is a useful taxanomy by Arjun Appadurai who has segregated it into five types of global connectivity:
- Ethnoscapes: movements of people, including tourists, immigrants, refugees, and business travellers.
- Financescapes: global flows of money, often driven by interconnected currency markets, stock exchanges, and commodity markets.
- Ideoscapes: the global spread of ideas and political ideologies. For example, Green Peace has become a worldwide environmental movement.
- Mediascapes: the global distribution of media images that appear on our computer screens, in newspapers, television, and radio.
- Technoscapes: the movement of technologies around the globe. For example, the Green Revolution in rice cultivation introduced western farming practices into many developing countries.
Anti-globalization
The people who are against globalization have many fronts on which they work at. There are those in the developed world who talk about issues ranging from illegal business practices by the corporations to loss of jobs to cheaper labor markets. Also, those in the developing world join this movement saying that it hurts the local common man as the local businesses dry up, as well as arguing for the Environmental concerns that they have due to unethical practices of the multi-national corporations!
Here is some information from Wikipedia:
Members of the anti-globalization movement generally advocate socialist or social democratic alternatives to capitalist economics, and seek to protect the world’s population and ecosystem from what they believe to be the damaging effects of globalization. Support for human rights NGOs is another cornerstone of the anti-globalization movement’s platform. They advocate for labor rights, environmentalism, feminism, freedom of migration, preservation of the cultures of indigenous peoples, biodiversity, cultural diversity, food safety, and ending or reforming capitalism. Many of the protesters are veterans of single-issue campaigns, including anti-logging activism, living wage, labor union organizing, and anti-sweatshop campaigns. Although most movement members see most or all of the aforementioned goals as complementary to one another, the number of different (and sometimes contradictory) issues has fueled a leading criticism that the movement lacks a consistent, coherent, or realistic cause.
Although adherents of the movement often work together, the movement itself is heterogeneous. It includes diverse and sometimes opposing understandings of the globalization process, and incorporates alternative visions, strategies and tactics. Many of the groups and organizations that are considered part of the movement were not founded as antiglobalist, but have their roots in various pre-existing social and political movements (with the possible exception of ATTAC). The anti-globalization movement has its precursors in such movements as the 1968 movement in Europe and the protest against the Vietnam War in the United States. The anti-globalization movement as it is now known stems from the convergence of these different political experiences when their members began to demonstrate together at international meetings such as the Seattle WTO meeting of 1999 or Genoa G/8 summit in 2001.
Its fairly obvious that opposition to this process can come from any quarter, and it is difficult to homogenize the movement. In the next post I will talk about the Pro-globalization folks.
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