Global 2 Midterm 1

The Curse of Hypercorrection in Latin America

1980s: Extreme neo-liberal leftist policymakers wanting to decentralize government caused new hypercorrective leaders to emerge and implement change. Political sectarianism, leading to polarization. Religious political coalitions in the US, Mexico, Colombia, Central America. Gender ideologies = anti-biblical, must concentrate on separation of church and state.

Pivoting Away From the Middle East

A few years ago Barack Obama made much of an American pivot to East Asia, a recognition of China's emergence and regional assertiveness, and the related claim that the American role in Asia-Pacific should be treated as a prime strategic interested that China needed to be made to respect. Avoob's reasoning is flawless, but disengagement won't happen, and not because Americans are not smart enough to recognize changed circumstances. Neither realist arguments about interests nor ethical considerations of principle will lead to an overdue American disengagement.

What Can Latin America Expect of President Trump?

A. Trump - Inconsistent, foreign policy agenda = Sound bites: Build a wall, rip up trade agreements -- must instead upon up dialogue about immigration reform. B. Andres Rozenthal: Trump election = loss of US as world leader in defense of noble international causes, avoid populist reactions in Mexican political arena. Abraham F. Lowenthal: Leadership skill of Trump in areas of globalization and immigration reform will be tested. Arturo Sarukhan: Trump (Republican Congress) will set back employment and free trade benefits with Canada, the US, Mexico, Peru, and Chile.

Discovering the New World Columbus Created

Almost twenty years ago, I came across a newspaper notice about some local college students had grown a hundred different varieties of tomato. A student offered us samples on a plastic plate. Among them was an alarmingly lumpy specimen, the color of an old brick, with a broad, green-black tonsure about the stem. The student gave me a catalog of heirloom seeds for tomatoes, chili peppers and beans. Not long after my trip to the greenhouse, I visited the library. These questions touched on a long-standing interest of mine: the original inhabitants of the Americas. They also carried some of the history after Columbus. I understand exactly what Crosby was getting at. Before Crosby looked into the matter, historians tended to explain Europe's spread across the globe almost entirely in terms of European superiority, social, or scientific. Crosby's books were constitutive documents in a new discipline: environmental history. Satellites map out environmental changes wreaked by the huge, largely hidden trade in latex, the main ingredient in natural rubber. Ever since violent protests at a 1999 World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle brought the idea of globalization to the world's attention, pundits of every ideological stripe have barraged the public with articles, books, white papers, blog posts, and video documentaries attempting to explain, celebrate, or attack it. Whipsawed between these two opposing views, the global network has become the subject of a furious intellectual battle, complete with mutually contradictory charts, graphs, and statistics -- and tear gas and flying bricks in the streets where political leaders meet behind walls of riot police to wrangle through international trade agreements. It is true that our times are different from the past.

African Diaspora Religions, Jeffrey Haynes

As many as 10 million Africans were transported from West and Central Africa to the Americas and the islands of the Caribbean between the 16th and 19th centuries, creating one of the largest and most jarring events of forced population change in global history. The term African diaspora religions (ADRs) refers to various African-based religions that relocated to the Americas as a consequence of Africans' enslavement. ADRs can be grouped into various types. Similar ideas and concepts that borrow from Catholicism. Candomble is a religion of the body, focusing on emotions and expressions. Santeria, also called Regla de Ocha or Regla Lucumi, is practiced widely in Cuba. Vodun, or Voodoo, is traceable to an African word for spirit. All such ADRs derive from West Africa. Cumina is a purely African religious cult, and elements of it remain in the rural communities of Jamaica. Jamaica has many Pentecostal churches, including the Jamaica Pentecostal Church of God Trinity and the United Pentescostal Church. Jamaica's Pentecostal churches were built on syncretistic ingredients of Jamaica's moral inheritance. In Jamaica, acceptance of North American Pentecostalism converged with elements of the African-derived moral order. Examples of religions that emphasize divination, healing, and spirit mediumship include the Afro-Brazilian religion Umbanda, characterized by Catholicism and Kardecist Spiritualism. In Jamaica, where economic downturn and political polarization are well-established phenomena, a syncretistic religious cult emerged, known as Rastafarianism. Jamaica's 2.8 million people, mostly descendants of West African slaves, are predominantly Christian, although about 100,000 describe themselves as Rastafarians. Following Jamaica's independence in 1962, serious riots occurred in 1965 and again in 1968, reflecting the polarization of society between a small rich elite and the mass of poor people. ADRs are variable and various.

How China Is Changing Its Manufacturing Strategy

Central Chinese government = Concerned about losses of low-end manufacturers to other countries, giving them incentives to move to lower-cost parts of China, but at the same time it wants to raise wages and spur consumer demand by developing more high-tech manufacturing like semiconductors and robots.

On the Study of Social Change, Immanuel Wallerstein

Change is eternal. Unless we are to use the study of social change as a term synonymous to the totality of social science, its meaning should be restricted to the study of changes in those phenomena which are most durable -- the definition of durability itself being of course subject to change over historical time and place. One of the major assertions of world social science is that there are some great watersheds in the history of man. This latter event is at the center of most contemporary social science theory, and indeed, of the nineteenth century as well. What are the appropriate units to study if one wishes to describe this difference and account for it? I started with an interest in the social underpinnings of political conflict in my own society. The second great debate, which was linked to the first, was about the degree to which there could or did exist a consensus of values within a given society, and to the extent that such a consensus existed, the degree to which its presence or absence was in fact a major determinant of men's actions. Values are of course an elusive thing to observe and I became very uneasy with a great deal of the theorizing about values, which seemed often to combine the absence a rigorous empirical base with an affront to common sense. I shifted my area of empirical concern from my own society in Africa in the hope either that I would discover theories confirmed by what I found there or that a look at distant climes would sharpen my perception by directing my attention to issues I would otherwise have missed. I went to Africa first during the colonial era and I witnessed the process of decolonization, and then of the independence of a cascade of sovereign states. In general, in deep conflict, the eyes of the downtrodden are more acute about the reality of the present. African nationalists were determined to change the political structures within which they lived. I sought to discover the general attributes of a colonial situation and to describe what I thought of as its natural history. I was interested equally in what happens to these new states after independence. The latter study ran into problems, however. In search for an appropriate unit of analysis, I turned to states in the period of formal independence but before they had achieved something that might be termed national integration. I was therefore forced by this logic to turn my attention to early modern Europe. At this point, I was clearly involved in a developmental schema and some implicit notion of stages of development. How many stages has there been? Furthermore, getting out of the conceptual morass was very difficult because of the absence of reasonable measuring instruments. One way to handle the absurd idea of comparing two such disparate units was to accept the legitimacy of the objection and add another variable -- the world context of a given era, or what Wolfram Eberhard has called "world time." Finally, there seemed to be another difficulty. It seemed to me it did. This was of course enormously satisfying. I was not interested in writing its history, nor did I begin to have the empirical knowledge necessary for such a task. There had only been one modern world.

Trump Is Making China Angry

China has been targeting the efforts of its state enterprises, bank loans, and manufactured exports from 2003 up until 2014. Chinese political gains will be limited: distant diplomatic relations suggest China will have tougher time getting Latin American states to treat it as a real political leader/provide relevant strategic concessions. Washington's difficulty does not necessarily mean Beijing opportunity. Latin Americans are highly favorable view of China, more interested in economic opportunity, however, and not deeper cultural/political relations. Confucius Institutes are not swaying Latin America for public relations.

China's Economic Empire

Combination of strong, rising China and economic stagnation in Europe and America making the West increasingly uncomfortable -- not taking over the world militarily but commercially sought to buy 2 iconic Western companies: Smithfield foods, Club Med.

The African Roots of War

Du Bois begins the piece by identifying a corollary problem in the word - namely, the presumed peripheral nature of Africa in general (to human civilization and history) and in particular (the fundamental causes of World War I). In order to correct the presumed general peripherality of Africa to human civilization, he promptly identifies the various contributions made by the many societies found in Africa over the span of human history. He subsequently traces this presumed peripherality of Africa to the world-historical problem of the day - World War - and acknowledges that many, incorrectly, presume "the Balkans as the storm-centre of Europe and the cause of war" (711) . But, really, Africa (specifically as an imperial hinterland), as Du Bois demonstrates in this text, is actually very central to understand the world-system. Now, despite this presumed peripherality of Africa, intellectual and political figures of the day had focused, to a certain extent, on understanding the world-system at the time in relationship to Africa, specifically with this apparent contradiction - the "paradox of democratic despotism". This, "the paradox of democratic despotism", is the principal problem in the word (and related to the problem in the world - democratic despotism itself) that this text engages with. Understanding this paradox is critical to understanding just how central Africa is to understanding the root causes of the World War and future wars. Indeed, resolving "the paradox of democratic despotism" by demonstrating the necessarily complimentary, rather than contradictory, nature of democracy deepening in the Global North as despotism deepens in the Global South is exactly the theoretical and political intervention of the text. I will flesh out my own understanding of this critical concept out further below using Du Bois own words, but, for the time being, allow me to briefly share the "paradox of democratic despotism," with the "paradox of democratic despotism" (the problem in the word) being distinct from "democratic despotism" itself (the problem in the word). The "paradox of democratic despotism" refers to conundrum political and intellectual thinkers on the left (from liberal to more progressive political inclinations) faced in attempting to understand the apparently contradiction of a concomitant deepening of "the democratic ideal" (that is, the extension of sanctioned avenues for political expression along with elements of the social safety net, or the 'social wage', for popular classes) in the Global North (or the metropole, the imperial nations) occurring along with the deepening of despotism (genocidal land-grabs and hyper-exploitation of any and all resources) in the Global South (or the imperial hinterlands, 'the darker nations'). In fact, he specifically situates the grapple with this riddle, this apparent contradiction of democracy deepening alongside despotism, among specific social bodies in the Global North: "It is this paradox which has confounded philanthropists, curiously betrayed the socialists, and reconciled the Imperialists and captains of industry to any amount of 'Democracy'"

The Next Big Future

FoxConn = 40,000 production robots out of 1 million goal in order to minimize the number of people it employs.

The Great Divergence, Kenneth Pomeranz

From roughly 1400 on, China was essentially remonetizing its economy after a series of failed experiments with paper and a grossly mismanaged copper coinage under the Yuan dynasty (1279-1358) had left the country without any widely accepted monetary medium. When Westerners did arrive, carrying silver from the richest mines ever discovered, they found that sending this silver to China yielded large and very reliable arbitrage profits -- profits so large there was no reason for profit-maximizing merchants to send much of anything else. Various Western intellectuals and politicians, who would have rather kept this silver at home as a stockpile pay for wars, were constantly arguing that other goods should be sent to Asia instead. The tendency to see China's import preferences as a sign of cultural conservatism has been further reinforced by treating silver as modern money in other words, a residual store of abstract value transferred to make up Europe's trade deficit. The arbitrariness of treating silver as money in the modern sense, which was sent to east Asia in lieu of goods rathjer than as a good the Chinese used as a monetary medium, becomes obvious once the issue is raised. The West's huge comparative advantage in the export of silver sucked in trendsetting prestige goods in Asia, roots this unique influx in an economic conjuncture spanning Europe, Asia, and America, rather than in any uniquely European materialism or curiosity. Those metals probably did little for Europe's economic development, since they financed numerous wars, including Spain's nearly successful assaults on the emerging core economies of northwest Europe. One substantial stream of New World gold and silver exports went to various ecologically rich small market zones in the Old World -- from Southeast Asia to parts of the Near East to eastern Europe -- making it possible for Europe to expand its imports of real resources from these peripheries. Since precious metals do not wear out or get used up, it was hard to create an expanding market for them if only one tiny part of the society used them. Second stream also helped Europe obtain land-intensive goods, but less directly. In India, as we have seen, there is a strong case for seeing much of the flow of gold and silver coins as meeting a broadly based transactions demand, rather than as a store of wealth that covered a trade deficit. Finally, the third stream of metals was for decades the largest of all, but this flow of silver probably did the least to ease pressures on Europe's land. Silver was clearly a good, not residual wealth used to settle unbalanced accounts. In China, as in India, it may be difficult to imagine another good that would have been imported on such a massive scale had silver not been available. Distinctions among various uses of New World treasure are post hoc and highly imperfect, and the association of different uses with different final destinations for the metals must be seen as tendencies, not absolute rules. Despite approximate and fluid nature of these categories, they do show us New World metals were not simply money that Europeans turned into real resources by distributing them around the Old World, with European needs always driving the story. Had China in particular not had such a dynamic economy that changing its metallic base could absorb the staggering quantities of silver mined in the New World over three centuries, those mines might have become unprofitable within a few decades.

Thinking Globally About African Religion, Jacob K. Olupona

Global dimensions of African religion sweep across the plains of the African continent and into the African diaspora. Some of the products of this growing interconnectedness of African and Africanized religions are new religions. The very language we use to describe the diverse religious experiences of people of African origin and descent is not only recent but also heavily dependent upon African paradigms and Eurocentric views. As a consequence, it is difficult to come up with a distinct notion of African religion that is independent of the shaping tendencies of the paradigms and terms of the Western world. In looking at the relationship between African religion and globalization, we should not assume that globalization is an inevitable force that will one day replace all traditional values within the world with one common consumerist mass culture. African traditions are adaptable. To some extent, these churches were separated from other African churches. The globalization of African religion, therefore, entails not only the death of African traditional values but also in many cases their expansion and promotion.

Globalization: Long Term Process Or New Era in Human Affairs?, William McNeill

Globalization refers to the way recent changes in transport and communication have tied humankind in all parts of the earth together more closely than ever before. Yet sporadic increases in the capacity of transport and communication are age-old among humankind and have always changed behavior. Dancing aroused a different kind of warmth by communicating a sense of commonality to participants that dissipated inter-personal frictions. The three capabilities remain unique to our species, and of the three, language is the most amazing. That process of trial and error induced systematic change in human behavior as never before, since discrepancy between hopes, plans, and actual experience was perennial and only increased as new skills and knowledge enlarged human impact on the diverse environments into which they soon penetrated. The subsequent human past can plausibly be understood as a series of thresholds when new conditions of life rather abruptly accelerated the pace of resulting change. Resort to agriculture was the next major accelerant of social change. Why our ancestors did so remains unsure. Dense populations raising different crops in diverse landscapes arose independently in several parts of the earth between 8000 BCE and 4000 BCE. Consequently, the pace of social change accelerated systematically within each of the major centers of agriculture because people made more inventions. In Eurasia, an impressive array of domesticated animals diversified the agricultural complex of evolving plants and people still further -- dogs, cats, donkeys, cattle, horses, water buffalo, camels, and still others. Accordingly, in the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa social change in general, largely dependent on contacts with strangers, fell behind the pace of Eurasian development, mostly due to contagious, lethal diseases. The appearance of cities and civilizations after 3500 BCE accelerated social change still further. When cities started to arise in Eurasia, merchants were already sailing overseas in ships and traveling overland with caravans of pack animals. The earliest civilizations of Mesopotamia and Egypt were in slender contact from the start, and successive West Asian empires and civilizations remained constantly in touch with Mediterranean cities and civilizations thereafter. The vastness and variety of peoples and landscapes within that circle far exceeded similar interacting webs in other parts of the earth. Biological resistance to a long array of infectious diseases from the common cold to small pox, measles, plague, and others, was the single most decisive factor in compelling previously isolated populations to submit to intruders from the disease-experienced Eurasian web. The human destructed that followed the opening of the oceans to sustained navigation in the decades immediately after Columbus's famous of 1492 was greater than ever before, since European explorers and conquistadors encountered populous, civilized lands in both Mexico and Peru where millions of persons died of new diseases within a few decades. In Eurasia itself after 1500 the pace of change also accelerated. From the long term point of view, therefore, recent mass migrations and widespread disruption of village patterns of life by roads, trucks, buses, radio, TV, and computers look more like another wave of intensified human interaction, comparable to its predecessors and far from unique. Argument about whether continuity or uniqueness prevails among us today is really pointless. I conclude that the world is indeed one interacting whole and always has been.

Jihad vs McWorld, Benjamin Barber

History is not over, nor are we arrived in the wondrous land of techne promised by the futurologists. Yet anyone who reads the daily papers carefully, taking in the front page accounts of civil carnage as well as the business page stories on the mechanics of the information superhighway and the economics of communication mergers, anyone who turns deliberately to take in the whole 360-degree horizon, knows that our world and our lives are caught between what William Butler Yeats called the two eternities of race and soul: that of race reflecting the tribal past, that of soul anticipating the cosmopolitan future. The first scenario rooted in race holds out the grim prospect of a retribalization of large swaths of humankind by war and bloodshed: a threatened balkanization of nation-states in which culture is pitted against culture, people against people, tribe against tribe, a Jihad in the name of a hundred narrowly conceived faiths against every kind of interdependence, every kind of artificial social cooperation and mutuality: against technology, against pop culture, and against integrated markets: against modernity itself as well as the future in which modernity issues. Some stunned observers notice only Babel, complaining about the thousand newly sundered peoples who prefer to address their neighbors with sniper rifles and mortars, others, zealots in Disneyland, seize on futurological platitudes and the promise of virtuality, exclaiming that It's a small world after all. We are compelled to choose between what passes as the twilight of sovereignty, and an entropic end of all history, or return to the past's most fractious and demoralizing discord; to the menace of global anarchy. The apparent truth, which speaks to the paradox at the core of this book, is that the tendencies of both Jihad and McWorld are at work, both visible sometimes in the same country and the very same instant. Now neither Jihad nor McWorld is in itself novel.

The Hidden Story of a Journey - Nayan Chanda

How do we know that we are all originally from Africa? Twenty years ago the proposition was mostly guesswork, but in his work on human evolution, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871), Charles Darwin suggested that because Africa was inhabited by humans' nearest allies, like gorillas and chimpanzees, it is somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere. The discovery of fossils of Homo erectus in Indonesia and China -- the so-called Peking men, showed the ancestors of Homo sapiens, or anatomically modern humans, had begun to travel and colonize Asia and the Old World about two million years ago. The discovery that all humanity stems from the same common parents came in 1987. The New Zealand biochemist Allan Wilson and his American colleague Rebecca Cann reached this conclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, by looking into a so far ignored part of human DNA -- they collected 147 samples of mitochondrial DNA from baby placentas donated by hospitals around the world, and unlike the DNA that is recombined as it is passed from one generation to the next, mitochondrial DNA, or mtDNA, has tiny parts that remain largely intact. A scientist has given these lines the nicknames Manju and Nasrin based on the assumption of where the two mutations are likely to have occurred: India and the Middle East. Y chromosome that establishes the male sex has an African ancestry. Wilson and Cann's thesis of the human out-of-Africa origin was, of course, challenged by some anthropologists and geneticists, argument that humans originated from China, not Africa, but large international database proved otherwise. Lack of archaeological evidence does not allow us to answer with certainty why our ancestors left Africa, probably a dry spell of the late Ice Age shrank the forests and dried the savannas that provided game for the hunter-gatherer population. One of the most striking human migration journeys was the arrival of the ancestral population from Africa to Australia in just seven hundred generations -- they were following food, the eastward movement of generations of people along the Indian and Southeast Asian coasts brought them to a continent twelve thousand miles from their East African origins.

Are Middle East Conflicts More Religious?, Jonathan Fox

If, as many believe and scholarship confirms, religion is particularly important in ethnic conflicts involving Muslims, how does this affect the nature of conflict in the Middle East? This is a simple question, but finding an accurate answer is not at all simple. It is complicated by two interrelated factors. This can be problematic because due to such preconceptions we often see relationships that we expect to see even if they do not exist, and we often fail to see relationships that do exist but that we never expected to exist or even imagined might exist. Second, the issue of Islam's role in generating conflict has become especially controversial since Samuel Huntington asserted that Islam has bloody borders and predicted that the dynamics of civilizational conflict in the post-Cold War era would reinforce and intensify this phenomenon. Thus can political agendas, preconceptions, and popular academic theories obfuscate and perhaps even alter the role of religion in the Middle East. This study uses an empirical method to provide a perspective on the issue different from the comparative approach. This analysis proceeds in two stages. Empirical analyses, several by this author, have established that the relationship between religion and conflict in general can be summed up as follows: Religious differences make conflict more likely and more intense. Religious issues influence the dynamics of conflicts. Religion shapes discrimination against ethnic minorities. Autocratic regimes are more likely than non-autocratic regimes to discriminate against religious minorities. Regimes in Muslim states are more autocratic. The Minorities art Risk (MAR) dataset, with information on 267 politically active ethnic minorities throughout the world, plus additional data collected by this author, provides insight into the nature of the Middle East's ethno-religious conflicts. Three preliminary points: 1. The MAR dataset, developed by the MAR projectheaded by Ted R. Gurr, is particularly useful for our purposes. 2. For the purposes of this study, an ethnic minority is considered to be of a different religion than the majority group in that state if 80 percent of the population of the minority group is of a religion different from the majority group. 3. MAR's data refer only to conflicts involving ethnic minorities within states and not to conflicts within the same ethnic group. Are ethnic conflicts between religiously differentiated groups particularly prevalent in the Middle East? Yes: 54 percent of the politically significant ethnic minorities in the Middle East are also religious minorities. An examination of religious factors in ethno-religious conflicts reinforces this picture. Comparing the results for the Middle East to other world regions and Muslim-majority states outside of the Middle East allows us to see something important: Whether the Middle East is unique in the intensity of conflicts with religious factors -- or whether such conflicts exist in other world regions or are common to all Muslim states. It turns out that all four religious factors surface considerably more often in the Middle East than in other regions. Comparisons involving non-Middle Eastern states with Muslim majorities are particularly interesting. To assess whether the Middle East's ethno-religious conflicts are particularly violent or intense, the presence of seven factors important in ethnic conflict are political discrimination, economic discrimination, cultural discrimination, repression, an expressed desire by a minority for autonomy, political demonstrations, and rebellion (terrorism, guerrilla warfare, or armed insurrection). Under what type of regimes do ethno-religious conflicts mostly take place -- autocratic, semi-democratic, or democratic? I find that 86 percent of Middle Eastern ethno-religious conflicts occur in autocratic states. This brings up a final question: do Islam and autocracy in the Middle East combine to make religion particularly important in the region's ethno-religious conflicts? This requires a comparison of the Middle East and the non-Middle East. To measure this, conflicts in countries outside the Middle East are broken down into five categories: states that are both autocratic and Muslim, states that are autocratic but not Muslim, semi-democratic states, and democratic states. Autocracy is also ruled out as an explanation: If autocracy were the sole explanation for the disproportionate importance of religious factors in the Middle East, we would expect it to have a uniform impact outside of the Middle East, which is not the case. What about Middle East's combination of Islam and autocracy? Outside of the Middle East, the combination is associated with results quite different from the same combination in the Middle East. Religion is more important in Middle Eastern conflicts than elsewhere. The Middle East is the most autocratic and least democratic region in the world. The level of ethnic conflict in the Middle East is about average. islam is not an explanation for the Middle East's uniqueness. These findings show that the obvious explanations for phenomena are not always the correct ones. In sum, ethno-religious conflicts in the Middle East is unique but not in the way many believe. These findings have several implications. That the issues involved in the Middle East's ethnic conflicts are particularly religious does not bode well for conflict resolution, for such conflicts are among the most long-lasting, violent, and difficult to settle. The Middle East's remaining the world's most autocratic place means that the post-Cold War trend of democratization has hardly reached it.

Explaining the Development Gap Between Latin America and the United States, Francis Fukuyama

In 1492, on the eve of European settlement and colonization of the New World, Bolivia and Peru hosted richer and more complex civilizations than any that existed in North America. It may be that the United States is simply exceptional in its ability to sustain long-term economic growth; if true, any comparison with other parts of the world would be unfair. The subject of Latin America's lagging performance is, of course, one that has been addressed at enormous length in the existing academic and popular literature, and there is no lack of theories for why the gap exists and no lack of recommendations for remedies. The long-term durability of the performance gap between Latin America and the United States suggests that closing it will not be an easy matter. There is another reason to think that centuries-long patterns of growth and divergence may not always persist in the future. Globalization is not merely the integration of markets for goods, services and investments; it also encompasses the flow of people and ideas. Latin America has been a constant importer of ideas from North America and Europe. Prior to the arrival of the Europeans in 1492, many parts of Latin America were richer than North America. The gap... really emerged in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, a period following Latin America's wars of independence from Spain and Portugal during which new states were being formed. The period from 1870 to 1970, in contrast, a period of modest catching up for most of Latin America. The gap widened again in the last three decades of the twentieth century with the speed of authoritarian regimes throughout the region. The 1990s and early years of the twenty-first century brought to most Latin American countries a return to economic orthodoxy and stable macroeconomic indicators. The gap has varied over time, opening up dramatically in some decades and then closing in others. There are other factors, however... Latin America must follow sensible economic policies that produce monetary and fiscal stability, while at the same time seeking to open the region's economies to the global trading system. It is important not to be excessively pessimistic about Latin America's overall prospects and the likelihood of closing the development gap in the future.

Movements and Patterns: Environments of Global History, Dominic Sachsenmaier

In a general sense, it is certainly possible to speak of long traditions of global or world historical thought and refer to such renowned figures as Herodotus or Ibn Khaldun as forefathers of the field. Indeed, in almost all world regions university-based historiography is at least partly an outcome of epistemological discontinuities, outside influence, and shared transformations. A brief look at early forms of historiography reaching across civilizational boundaries will help us fill this rather rough sketch with some more detail and further accentuate the changing conceptions of space that became foundational to modern historiography in many different parts of the world. Outside of Europe, world historical outlooks were also usually written from the belief in the normative authority of one's own cultural experience. Of course, culturally centrist outlooks of world history during the pre-modern period were neither globally uniform nor did they remain completely unchallenged.Concomitant with the global spread of modern universities and profound change in historiographical cultures, the belief in Europe as the sole cradle of modern scholarship came to be adopted in many parts of the world. Given these massive changes in Europe itself, many globally influential character traits of modern academic histiography need to be seen not as export, products of an allegedly pristine European tradition but rather as byproducts of wider, global transformations and entanglements. For these reasons it would be erroneous to treat the global spread of Eurocentric themes in history as the result of diffusion from the West to the rest. In conclusion, the transformations of nineteenth- and twentieth- century scholarship had great implications for the spatial parameters within which historians in different parts of the world would think about local and translocal history.

Globalization: A Contested Concept, Manfred Sanger

In the autumn of 2001, I was teaching an undergraduate class on modern political and social theory. Struck by the sense of intellectual urgency that fueled my student's question, I realized that the story of globalization would remain elusive without real-life examples capable of breathing shape, color, and sound into a vague concept that had become the buzzword of our time. The infamous videotape bears no date, but experts estimate that the recording of Osama bin Laden was made less than two weeks before it was broadcast. To further illustrate this apparent contradiction, consider the complex chain of global interdependencies that must have existed in order for bin Laden's message to be heard and seen by billions of TV viewers around the world. Indeed, the network's market share increased even further as a result of the dramatic reduction in the price and size of satellite dishes. Unhampered by national borders and geographical obstacles, cooperation among these sprawling news networks had become so efficient that CNN acquired and broadcast a copy of the Osama bin Laden tape only a few hours after it had been delivered to the Al-Jazeera office in Kabul. There can be no doubt that it was the existence of this chain of global interdependencies and interconnections that made possible the instant broadcast of bin Laden's speech to a global audience. A close look at bin Laden's right wrist reveals yet another clue to the dynamics of globalization. Our brief deconstruction of some of the central images on the videotape makes it easier to understand why the seemingly anachronistic images of an antimodern terrorist in front of an Afghan cave do, in fact, capture some essential dynamics of globalization. The result of globalization is a more unified and interactive planet -- a globalized world. These broad global trends seem vast, and they are. Roland Robertson coined the term glocal to describe these examples of globalism in a local setting. At the same time that global trends influence local settings, the reverse can also happen: global patterns can be reinterpreted on a local level. In the readings in this section, these concepts of globalization and globalism are explored by several influential scholars in the field of global studies. The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman also agrees that the era of globalization is relatively recent. Paul James, a sociologist who helped develop the global studies program at RMIT University of Melbourne, Australia, tries to put this global phenomenon in order. Globalization is a basic feature of modern life.

Religion and Politics in Arab Transitions, Barah Mikhail

Islamist parties, excluded from the political sphere for much of the last decade, are now coming to the forefront of Arab politics. The role of religion in Arab politics will be determined by the people of the region. The line between religion and ethnicity, culture and tradition is not always clear. Long before the Arab spring, religion was recognized as a major force in Arab politics. In 2011, new Islamist parties emerged and previously established ones consolidated to their positions. The fact that it has a Muslim majority does not mean that the Arab world must automatically embrace Islamist rule or reject secularism. For decades, leaders from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) controlled the religious sphere in their countries, either by influencing religious leaders, as in the case of al-Azhar in Egypt and the Muftis in Saudi Arabia and Syria, or by direct interference, as in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, as well as in Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, and Libya. The current Islamist momentum does not necessarily mean that religious precepts are set to dominate the Arab world. Drafting a new constitution gives new deputies the chance the determine the degree to which religion will affect their country's future political, legal, and social system. Western partners typically view a strict separation between state and religion as a necessary prerequisite for a democratic political system. Past international experiences provide some lessons on how to balance the democratic rule of law with religious norms and traditions. Transition to democracy often leads to modernization, but modernization does not have to come through secularization. The degree of religiosity of a society will influence the role religion plays in a transition. Minorities' attempts to achieve political gains during transition processes may lead to segregation into religiously defined communities, including through territorial fragmentation. Religious issues are often closely linked with power politics. Some conservative governments provide financial support to religious institutions in order to enhance their countries' influence through these groups' proselytising activities. Cultural and religious determinism is a myth, prosperity and strong religiosity are not incompatible, and no religion or belief is more favorable to peaceful transition to democracy than another. Religion has a big part to play in the MENA region. This does not mean, however, that religion will remain the dominant political factor in the long run. The objectives and ideological and political influences of these parties may cause them to adopt any of a range of political models, from the so-called Turkish model where religious freedom is guaranteed even though a religion party is in power, to a theocratic model such as that of Iran. The most urgent challenge for the MENA region is building new and modern states that guarantee citizenship and human rights, including freedom of belief.

Germany Moves to Atone for Forgotten Genocide in Namibia

It has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century: tens of thousands of men, women, and children shot, starved, and tortured to death by German troops as they put down rebellious tribes in what is now Namibia. In Berlin a major new exhibition about the country's bloody colonial history opened earlier this winter. The issue has long-caused tensions in Namibia, where farmers descended from the original German settlers still own land seized from local people. Instead of direct payments, German negotiators have proposed setting up a foundation for youth exchanges with Namibia and funding various infrastructure projects, such as vocational training centers, housing developments, and solar power stations. Jurgen Zimmerer, a historian at Hamburg University and consultant to the new exhibition, argued that colonial amnesia had created a warped perspective on later German crimes in the 20th century. Other colonial powers have been deeply reluctant to acknowledge the violence associated with their imperial history.

Is the Rise of China Sustainable?, Ho-Fung Hung

It is doubtful whether China's formidable export engine, so far the economy's single most profitable component as well as one that neutralizes the risk of an overaccumulation crisis will last indefinitely. The expansion of the U.S. consumer market has hinged on an unsustainable, debt-financed consumption spree and has created a mega-current account deficit. Just at the moment when an economic slowdown is looming, the environmental cost of three decades of reckless development has begun to exact a toll on the Chinese economy that could constrain its GDP growth. Highest echelon of China's party-state elite has long been aware of the vulnerability of the economy, and they have been actively devising preemptive policies to redress the economic imbalance. The ambition of these high-sounding measures notwithstanding the key question is how the central government could ensure their full implementation by local governments. Given the strong resistance to these economic and environmental regulations on the part of local vested interests, providing an overaccumulation crisis through these regulations will inevitably involve more than technical policy change. Given the great imbalance of the Chinese economy and the delay in its sociopolitical restructuring, China is increasingly vulnerable to any protracted economic slump that can curtail China's capability of exporting its excess capacity to the world. Thus, despite the increasing likelihood of an economic slowdown or contraction in China in the short to medium ruin due to its overaccumulation tendency and environmental crisis, it is quite possible that the shift of the center of gravity of global capitalism to Asia in general and to China in particular will sustain in the long-run, creating a new global order in the twenty-first century -- can be achieved if China becomes more egalitarian, coordinated, and less environmentally destructive.

China-Latin America Economic Bulletin

LAC's trade deficit with China = Relatively constant in 2015, 0.6 percent of regional GDP, increasing volumes of major commodities coupled with falling prices. Chinese lending to LAC leapt upward in 2015, $29.1 billion, $35 billion in new regional funds with Latin America in infrastructure and industrial development. Chinese overseas investment = concentrated in primary materials of extractive industries, like oil, gas, and mining. Major Chinese investment/financing projects: Twin Ocean Railway, Capital de Las Ciencias Industrial Park, Nicaragua Canal's assessment.

Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Countries, Denis Lynn Daly Heyck

Of course, poverty existed long before globalization, but currently it seems that most local and national efforts to fight poverty are undercut by that process.Much recent research confirms that globalization and development are having an enormous impact even in the most remote corners of Latin America, and that their effects are destructive of traditional communities and cultures. Two powerful constants underlie local strategies: attitudes toward the land, tenure, ownership, and one's relationship to it and religious faith, both institutional and popular. In Bolivia, the story is that of the painstaking efforts of foreign missionaries working with local Guarani to revive the degraded Guarani culture, helping to save their language and rescue from near extinction traditional indigenous values of community and assembly, including above all a town hall type of democracy. In Nicaragua, the central story is the stubborn resistance by a number of campesinas, or rural women, to the erasure of certain features of the Nicaraguan revolution, particularly, their feminist consciousness in sustaining their cooperatives and their tenacity in defending their rights, at a time when the official Catholic church, like the national government, has metamorphosed from revolutionary to reactionary. In each case, then there is a unique central story, but there is also a common one among the three: a basic conflict over land rights. The other approach to the land, that of these particular communities, is long-term and rational. The capitalist-growth and traditional-communitarian views conflict sharply, especially when placed within the broader context of rapidly accelerating economic globalization.

Will China's Guest For Indigenous Innovation Succeed? - Lessons From Nanotechnology

PAST DECADE: Chinese state = Major efforts to transition China's economy away from manufacturing and toward innovation, nanotechnology, underperforms despite investment in scene parks, applied R&D, and large talent pool of scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs.

Slavery, Dilip Hiro

Slavery had an enormous impact on the history of the global economy, records show the existence of slavery in such ancient civilizations as Assyria, the Nile Valley, Greece, and the Roman empire. Capture of slaves and slave trading thrived in the Christian world, where the population had authority in religious in moral affairs, enslaving pagans and nonbelievers. Latter half of the 16th century, Iberian kings ended their slave trading monopoly, private slave traders transported slaves to the Iberian colonies in the Western Hemisphere, where there were vast plantations producing labor-intensive products. England, important European maritime nation, developing contacts with West Africa and Asia, slavery process spanned from 1562-1655. Rise of vast plantations worked by slaves, cost their owners the bare minimum of maintenance, marked a qualitative change in the history of slavery. Under the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, Britain acquired from France the contract to supply African slaves the Spanish colonies from its Caribbean territories. Britain became leading slave trading nation in 50 years. British involvement in, and the profits from slavery and the slave trade increased, concept of the slave as a commodity began to emerge. Similar view of slaves as property was taken by the courts in England, where in the mid-18th century, thousands of households of English aristocrats and retired planters used African slaves as serving boys and menservants. Religious and cultural justifications were often advanced to establish the inherent inferiority of negroes as a race, argued that they were descendants of the Black son of Noah, naturally hewers of wood and drawers of water. Among small pockets of European settlers in North America, arose objections to slavery, like the Quakers in Pennsylvania in 1688, Vermont declared slavery illegal in 1777. Netherlands abolished slave trading in 1814, Brazil did so in 1826. Law abolishing slavery in the British Empire passed in London in 1833 and forced the following year, yet slavery continued elsewhere. between 1518 and 1853, European nations filled their Western Hemisphere-bound slave ships with 20 million Africans, of which only about 15 million survived the grueling conditions of the overcrowded African ports in months-long Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Slavery, knowledge of Christianity was often withheld from slaves, although one of the earliest justifications for embarking on the slave trade and slavery given by Europeans in general, Sir John Hawkins wanted to Christianize the Africans. Furthermore, by intermingling slaves from different tribes to form work gangs, and banning the practice of their respective language and religious rituals, slave owners encouraged the decline of African religions. Several slave masters in Jamaica considered this development disturbing, and attempted to formalize it by importing, in 1745, Moravian missionaries from America to instruct the slaves in Christian doctrine. The African belief in the supernatural was blended with the Christian concept of Jesus the Savior. The claim that slavery, which underwent profound changes during the past millennia, is now extinct must be qualified, but persists in Arabian Peninsula.

The 21st Century Will Be Asian

The 21st century will be Asian. In the 20th century, though starting from a lower level than before, the Asian growth rate has been faster than in the West, and in the last half century since the liberation of China and the end of colonialism the rate of economic growth in East Asia has been double that of the West. The East Asian financial and economic crisis, starting in Japan and in 1997 in Thailand, was misunderstood and greeted in the West as proof of Asian weakness. This was the first time that an economic crisis started in the East and moved West rather than the other way around. To examine the present and future, it will be useful to consider some alternative scenarios. Also, because world reserves and principle payments -- especially for oil and gold are in dollars, the U.S. can and does simply print dollars and uses them to buy up the rest of the world's production for American consumption and investment. One resulting scenario is that this situation offers an opportunity for more productive and competitive Europeans to step in and replace the dollar with the euro/and or another as the world's reserve currency. My alternative scenario is Asian, including a possible Asian currency basket. But that is only the half of it, because the Chinese use these paper dollars to purchase paper Treasury certificates, paying only 4-5% of the yearly interest. Japan has to keep the export game going, even if it means subsidizing the U.S. The main reason the Chinese give to keep the dollar up against the Chinese yuan and other dollar-linked currencies down in order to be able to sell to the U.S. market. 1. In the south, Lingna, centered on the Hong Kong-Guangzhou corridor. 2. Fujian, centered on Amoy/Xiamen and focusing on the Taiwan straits and all of Southeast Asia in the South China Sea. 3. The Yangtze Valley, centered on Shanghai, whose trade with Japan is again taking the lead. 4. Northeast Asia -- ample mineral, forestry, agricultural, and petroleum resources and abundant low-cost Chinese and North Korean labor can permit Chinese, Japanese, and South Korean capital to again develop the area into an important regional growth center in itself and the world market.

The Reasons for The Victory, Tzevtan Todorov

The counter between Old World and New made possible by Columbus's discovery is of a very special type: war, or rather, in the term of the period, conquest. The chief stages of the conquest of Mexico are well known. Let us first review the explanations commonly proposed for Cortes's victory: Ambiguous, hesitant behavior of Montezuma himself. In certain chronicles, Montezuma is depicted as a melancholy and resigned man, it is asserted that he is a prey to his bad conscience, expiating in person an inglorious episode of earlier Aztec history: the Aztecs like to represent themselves as the legitimate successors of the Toltecs, the previous dynasty, whereas they are in reality usurpers, newcomers. Once the Spaniards have arrived in his capital, Montezuma's behavior is even more singular. Unfortunately, we lack the documents that might have permitted us to penetrate the mental world of the strange emperor: in the presence of his enemies he is reluctant to make use of his enormous power, as if he were not convinced he wished to conquer. The figure of Montezuma certainly counts for something in this nonresistance to evil. Sensitized as we are to the misdeeds of European colonialism, it is difficult for us to understand why the Indians do not immediately rebel, when there is still time, against the Spaniards. But it is precisely the same thing that the Indians complained of in the other parts of Mexico when they related the Aztecs' misdeeds. The gold and precious stones that lure the Spaniards were already taken as taxes by Montezuma's functionaries. There are many resemblances between old conquerers and new, as the latter themselves felt, since they described the Aztecs as recent invaders, conquistadors comparable to themselves. The same holds true in the realm of faith: religious conquest often consists in removing from a holy place certain images and establishing others there instead, preserving, and this is essential -- the cult sites in which the same aromatic herbs are burned. It is only just that what had served the worship of the demons should be transformed into a temple for the service of God, writes Fray Lorenzo de Bienvenida. To Montezuma's hesitations during the first phase of the conquest and the internal divisions among the Mexicans during the second, a third actor is frequently added: the Spanish superiority with regard to weapons.

Economic Growth in Asia, Steve Radelet, Jeffrey Sachs, and Jong-Wha Lee

The countries of East and Southeast Asia grew extremely rapidly during the last quarter century. We explore Asian growth patterns by quantifying the empirical relationships between long-term growth and various structural and policy variables. Our approach does not identify all of the specific factors associated with economic growth across countries, nor does it in every case clarify the precise channels through which certain variables affect growth. Basic empirical framework is based on an extended version of the neoclassical growth model, the model predicts conditional convergence of income: A country with a low initial income relative to its own long-run or steady state potential level of income will grow faster than a country that is already closer to its long-run potential of income. If we could presume that all countries have the same steady-state income levels, then the neoclassical approach would imply, simply that poorer countries would grow faster than richer countries when in fact, this pattern is not generally observed. We should point out that in searching for these common traits across successful economies, we are not suggesting that there has been only one path to sustained development. Hong Kong and Singapore are small, urban, very open economies that have relied heavily on commerce and a free port service as the foundation for growth. Korea and Taipei, China are also relatively small economies with few natural resources and a well-educated workforce. Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand are larger countries with abundant natural resources and a small human capital base. China's path to development has different dramatically from other developing countries. These differences suggest that the road to sustained growth and development differed in important ways across the regions, four key areas attributed to rapid growth of East/Southeast Asian countries though: 1. Openness, manufactured exports 2. Higher savings and investment 3. Strong macroeconomic management, especially government fiscal policy, and 4. Education.

The Cycle of "State-Ethnicity-State" in African Politics

The genocide of Rwanda in 1994 radically changed the attitudes of Africans and non-Africans alike toward ethnicity in Africa. This essay seeks to answer these questions. Our view is that ethnicity in Africa arises from the projection of state power by those who control the state. As Ake argues, what occurs for the most part in Africa is violent aggression by the state against communities, ethnic groups, minorities, workers, peasants, religious groups, and the political opposition in the routine business of projecting power to realize vested interests and to sustain domination. For example, the resort to arms by the Banyamulenge ethnic group in the Congo (DRC) emerged ex post facto from the unilateral state policy of the Mobutu regime to divest them of their citizenship of the country. This state-ethnicity nexus dates back to the colonial period. This ethnicity was reinforced by the ruthless projection of state power during the early post-colonial period. Furthermore, the growth of ethnicity is promoted by the tendency of globalization to bring everyone into close proximity by shrinking everything into one small intimate space that has to be fought for incessantly. Such tensions are compounded by the increasing openness of state boundaries spawned by globalization. By all indications, African peoples have sought to resist oppressive state presences by embracing new identities, sometimes different from their pre-colonial identities. Unlike pre-colonial ethnicity, the ethnicity that emanates from these rapidly changing national and global conditions is fiercely competitive and intolerant of ethnic minority views and feelings.

Five Years After the Arab Spring: A Critical Evaluation

The transformative impact of the Arab Spring on the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) symbolizes a turning point in the history of the region. On the domestic fronts, the Arab Spring brought the analyses of democratization and robustness of authoritarianism to the fore with a rich variety of cases for discussion. The first challenge was the robustness of authoritarianism in the Middle East and the differential ability of rulers to learn and recalibrate policies to preserve their hold on power. The reactions of the ruling regimes vary according to their receptivity and resistance to the transformative claims set forth by the new collective consciousness. The Arab Spring is now at a critical phase at both popular forces and the ruling elites are recalculating their policies and reshaping attitudes toward change and the opinion of the resistance. The Turkish-Iranian system is different than the Arab systems in reference to political institutions and social demands. The Turkish situation is more about the enhancement of democracy, fine-tuning, and active participation in decision-making process and a fundamental emphasis on economic development. The situation in Turkey remains uncertain as the aftermath of failed coup has created contradictory signals about what to expect from the perspective of stability, human rights, and democracy. The Kurdish system is the most problematic challenge confronting Turkey. Fuat Keyman deals with the regional crisis and explains how this contributes to global turmoil. Pınar Akpınar focuses on the limits of mediation with respect to conflict resolution in the five years of Arab Spring. Halil Ibrahim Yenigün explores the repercussions of the purported failure of Islamist experimentations with democracy during the Arab Spring in terms of the inclusion-moderation hypotheses with a specific focus on the Egyptian case. Richard Falk evaluates the aftermath of the Arab Spring through the dual optic of a regional phenomenon and a series of country narratives.

How Globalization Went Bad, Steven Weber

The world today is more dangerous and less orderly than it was supposed to be. What went wrong? The bad news of the 21st century is that globalization has a significant dark side. That's nice work if you can get it. But the United States almost certainly cannot. A straightforward piece of logic from market economies helps explain why unipolarity and globalization don't mix. Axiom 1: Above a certain threshold of power, the rate at which new global problems are generated will exceed the rate at which old problems are fixed. Axiom 2: In an increasingly networked world, places that fall between the networks are very dangerous places -- and there will be more ungoverned zones when there is only one network to join. Axiom 3: Without a real chance to find useful allies to counter a superpower, opponents will try to neutralize power by going underground, going nuclear, or going bad. The world is paying a heavy price for the instability created by the combination of globalization and unipolarity, and the United States is bearing most of the burden. How would things be different in a multipolar world? For starters, great powers could split the job of policing proliferation, and even collaborate on some particular cases. If there were rival great powers with different cultural and ideological learnings, globalization's darkest problem of all -- terrorism -- would also likely look quite different. The consensus today in the U.S. foreign-policy community is that more American power is always better. Across the board. America has experienced this dangerous burden for 15 years, but it still refuses to see it for what it really is.

Approaches to Globalization, Paul James

There are many different approaches to the study of globalization, testifying to the diversity and vitality of the field of global studies. Studies of globalization and, more generally, in the broad and loosely defined field of global studies did not become conscious of themselves as such until the 1990s; and by then the direct-line lineages of classic social theory had either been broken or segmented. There is an irony in this retreat from generalizing theory that is important to note: It concerns a paradox that is yet to be explained. Although there were some isolated articles across the 1960s to 1980s directly referring to globalization -- with the most prominent of these being by Theodore Levitt on the globalization of markets in 1983 -- more elaborate academic approaches to globalization lagged by a decade or so. The work of Wallerstein in the discipline of international political economy can here be used as an indication of the difficulty of coming to terms with issues of globalization. Alternatively and more productively, the work of Roland Robertson took a cultural turn. Another key figure of this time, Arjun Appadurai, also followed the cultural turn, but instead of taking a critical modernist position on the changing order of things as Robertson did, he headed down the postmodern path to emphasize fluidity. A third wave of attention emerged across the turn of the century into the present. In the domain of culture, for example, a penetrating critique of the dominant ideology of globalization by Manfred Steger joined with others in introducing the notion of globalism. Other ways to differentiate approaches to globalization include their normative or ethical orientation and their political descriptive stance. With the realization in the 1990s that the global required direct attention, the taken-for-granted assumptions of fields of study such as international relations, politics, and sociology came under direct challenge. One discipline that saw a sea change in its approach was anthropology. A developing aversion to grand theory did not mean that the old theoretical lineages became completely irrelevant, although it did mean that approaches associated with the classical social theories of Karl Marx, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber tended either to draw more loosely on those past writings or to work across them synthetically. Marxist writer Justin Rosenberg immediately took Giddens to task for theoretical incoherence. Now, after three decades of writing on globalization, we have made some extraordinary gains in understanding. On the other side of the ledger, our central weakness of understanding goes back to the central paradox of global studies -- the emergence of an aversion to generalizing theory at a time when the importance of a generalizing category of relations came to the fore.

The Chinese Century - China's Move Toward Indigenous Innovation - Some Policy Implications

US infrastructure used to be the best, but our lead has slipped: China = building faster trains, newer airports, engineers gave national innovation subpar score.

As the US Sleeps, China conquers Latin America

US's trade with Latin America = Critical to survival as economic superpower, 2006 in US = LTP for 127, CH = LTP for 70, 2011: US = LTP for 76, CH = LTP for 124. Still a big lead in Latin America, $850 billion in combined imports/exports in 2013, $244 billion for China in 2012, China closing gap at phenomenal pace. US: $34 billion --> $527 billion for Mexico, but $183 billion --> $14 billion for the rest of the Latin America. China = Sells low quality products to LA and high quality ones to the US/Europe: Strategic loan, $400 million loan to Costa Rica for increased trade/tourism. America needs intelligent aggressive integrated policy: Discovering what its southern neighbors want and accommodating them so both sides gain.

Thinking Globally About Islam, Said Amir Arjomand

Virtually from its inception, Islam has been a global religion. The Islamic era begins with the migration of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622. In addition to studying the Qur'an, several schools of pious learning began to collect and transmit the Traditions -- reports of the sayings and deeds -- of the Prophet. The contribution of sects and heterodoxies to social transformation in the Islamic civilization has been considerable. The Arab confederate tribes which ruled a vast empire of conquest were not keen on the conversion of its subject populations. In the subsequent centuries, however, the pattern of institutionalization of Islam through Islamic law showed its definite and rather rigid limits. Since the beginning of the early modern period, a number of Islamic movements have responded to the challenge of popular religiosity by advocating the revival or renewal of Islam by returning to the Book of God and the pristine Islam of the Prophet. Since the nineteenth century, Islam has faced the political and cultural challenges of the West. Continuous improvement and declining cost of transportation since World War II has greatly increased the number of pilgrims to Mecca and of missionaries from Africa and Asia to the main centers of Islamic learning in the Middle East. The post-colonial era has witnessed massive immigration of Muslims into Western Europe and North America where sizeable Muslim communities were formed. The effects of globalization on Islam are interpreted variously. I believe Barber's view on Islam and globalization, which is widely shared by journalists and commentators, is fundamentally mistaken. An interesting feature of globalization is the unfolding of anti-global sentiments in particularistic, variety-producing movements that seek local legitimacy but nevertheless have a global frame of self-reference. The dynamics of Islam as a universalist religion therefore includes a fundamentalist, trend, alongside many others, that has been reinforced by some of the contemporary processes of social change, including globalization.

The Ideology of the Horizons, Mohammed Bamyeh

We are speaking of a terrain in which life repeats itself both endlessly and precariously. The Arabian Peninsula -- the cradle of Islam -- is dominated by the two vast deserts that occupy the bulk of the land. There are notable exceptions of course, to this story: The recurrent Semitic migrations outside of the peninsula during the four millenia preceding Islam were clearly intended to free population groups from such a magnitude of resourcelessness. But before such a permanent encampment, the concreteness of existential emptiness could be derived purely by looking. This perplexing appeal of the horizon situates it exactly at the borderline, between two modes of wandering. Throughout the peninsula, movement was the norm and halting the exception. Agriculture, the primary precondition for settlement, was possible as a large-scale activity only in Yemen and the Green Mountain in Uman. Thus, the particular story of permanent halting in Mecca contains simultaneous elements of knowledge of an independence from all the great powers of the epoch, including peninsular powers such as Yemen. Mecca's location deep in the desert insulated the city from the fate of the other nascent trading centers that were annexed to such powers. In this case, an act of halting -- indeed, an expression of an intention to halt forever -- was seen to depend on God's leave and bounty.

Imperial Trajectories

We live in a world of nearly two hundred states. Throughout history, most people have lived in political units that did not pretend to represent a single people. The endurance of empire challenges the notion that the nation-state is natural, necessary, and inevitable, and points us instead toward exploring the wide range of ways in which people over time, and for better or worse, have though about politics and organized states. Not every significant state was an empire but for most of human history empires and their interactions shaped the context in which people gauged their political possibilities, pursued their ambitions, and envisioned their societies. We begin with Rome and China in the third century BCE, not because they were the first empires -- their great predecessors include Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Alexander the Great's enormous conquests, and more ancient dynasties in China -- but because these two empires became long-lasting reference points for later empire builders. In the thirteenth century, under Chinggis Khan and his successors, Mongols put together the largest land empire of all time, based on a radically different principle -- a pragmatic approach to religious and cultural difference. The Mongols are critical to our study for two reasons. It was the wealth and commericial vitality of Asia that eventually drew people from what is now thought of as Europe into what was fro them a new sphere of trade, transport, and possibility. European maritime extensions were the product of three conditions: the high-value goods produced and exchanged in the Chinese imperial sphere, the obstacle posed by the Ottoman empire's dominance of the eastern Mediterranean and land routes east, and the inability of rulers in western Eurasia to rebuild Roman-style unity on a terrain contested by rival monarchs and dynasts, lords with powerful followings, and cities defending their rights. New connections eventually reconfigured the global economy and world politics. In the Americas, settlers from Europe, slaves from Africa, and their imperial masters produced new forms of imperial politics. Empire, in Europe or elsewhere, was more than a matter of economic exploitation. It was only in the nineteenth century that some European states, fortified by their imperial conquests, gained a clear technological and material edge over their neighbors in other regions of the world. Imperial expansion across land -- not just seas -- produced distinct configurations of politics and society. Britain, France, Germany, and other European countries were less reticent about colonial rule, and they applied it with vigor to new acquisitions in Africa and Asia in the late nineteenth century. Empires, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as in the sixteenth, existed in relation to each other. In the twentieth century it was rivalry among empires -- made all the more acute by Japan's entry into the empire game and China's temporary lapse out -- that dragged imperial powers and their subjects around the world into two world wars. What drove these major transformations in world politics? Other studies of world history attribute major shifts to the rise of the state in early modern period, two terms tied to the notion of a single path toward a normal and universal kind of sovereignty -- the western kind. To the extent that states became more powerful in England and France in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these transformations were a consequence of empire rather than the other way around. In other words, this study of empire breaks with the special claims of nation, modernity, and Europe to explain the course of history.