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READING GUIDE

Sebastin Orjuela Rincn

Steger, Manfred. 2003. Globalization: a contested concept. In Globalization: A Very Short


Introduction, 1-16. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

o What is Stegers definition of globalization?

o Why does Steger argue that Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden are exemplary of
globalization?

o Name all of the aspects that Steger identifies in bin Ladins video to support his
argument.

o Why does Steger argue that globalization is a contested concept?

o List the debates and disagreements about globalization:

Cooper, Frederick. 2001. What Is the Concept of Globalization Good for? An African Historians
Perspective. African Affairs 100 (399): 189-213.

o What is Coopers argument about the usefulness of globalization as an analytical


category? Why?

Cooper says that the concept of globalization is usefulness because in the academic circles in
which is used, the term is not precise to describe processes that are large-scale, but not
universal, and with the fact of crucial linkages that cut across state borders and lines of cultural
difference but which nonetheless are based on specific mechanisms within certain boundaries.
This is because we describe and use the term in situations that involved the global with the
local, but doesnt let us analyze anything in between.

o In relation to which historical era(s) does Cooper analyze globalization?

The author compares globalization with the idea of modernization. The concept that started to
being used in the 50s and 60s can be understood as the free trade and free movement of
capital. It describes a process, not necessarily fully realized yet but ongoing and probably
inevitable, meaning that change is rapid and pervasive. The author gives us the example of
READING GUIDE

what can be seen as the movement from traditional to modern societies: from subsistence to
industrial economies, from predominantly rural to predominantly urban societies, from
extended to nuclear families, from ascriptive to achieved status, from sacred to secular
ideologies, from the politics of the subject to the politics of the participant, from diffuse and
multi- faceted to contractual relationships.

o Note the different views/discourses that Cooper identifies regarding globalization:

- the 'modern' instititutions of production, commercialization, and capital movement described


by James and Williams

24 What was most 'global' in the nineteenth century was not the actual structure of economic
and political interaction, but the language in which slavery was discussed by its opponents: a
language of shared humanity and the rights of man, evoked by a transatlantic social movement,
Euro-American and Afro-American.

that. Colonial invasions entailed the concentration of military power in small spaces, the
movement of colonial armies onward, and a strikingly unimpressive colonial capacity to
exercise power systematically and routinely over the territories under European rule. A
'globalizing' language stood alongside a structure of domination and exploitation that was
lumpy in the extreme. This is little more than a sketch of a complex

o What is his evaluation of activists anti-globalization discourse?

The author says that the activist against globalization (trade unions and NGOs) need to look out
to the history and the people that preceded them in the late eighteenth century, such as the
anti-slavery movement and anti-colonial movements from the 1930s that fought to make the
word'colony' unacceptable in international discourse. Also, that is necessary to understand the
patterns of interconnection, the choices and constraints which they imply, and the
consequences of different sorts of actions along different sorts of interfaces so that they
oppose what the real problems are.
Compare and contrast Stegers and Coopers conceptualizations of globalization: Do they
have the same definition? In which ways do they agree and where do they disagree?

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