GLOBAL
2007
Richard A. Dello Buono, Global Division Chair (2005-2007)
Buenos Aires, ARGENTINA
In his 1993 SSSP Presidential Address, William J. Chambliss hammered away on the need for scholars to conceptualize the global character of social problems. This concern soon became echoed in the Society’s journal Social Problems and in its official newsletter The SSSP Forum where submissions that grappled with global themes steadily increased throughout the 1990s. In 2001, Social Problems editor David A. Smith published a special issue on “Globalization and Social Problems,” something that turned out to be the first, post-Sept. 11th issue of the journal. Global themes such as those involving international sex tourism (Wonders and Michalowski), changing labor conditions under global economic restructuring (Parrado and Zenteno; Anderson, Schulman and Wood), international legal discourses concerning the practice of female mutilation (Boyle, Songora, and Foss), and countless others had now assumed a prominent place within social problems studies. SSSP Global Division formed in this intellectual context.
With greater focus on the accelerating tendencies of a global political economy, social problems researchers demonstrate increasing concern for such topics as international law and the relationship between global protest, law and social control agencies. Once placed squarely in the analytical limelight of global political economy, social problems become broadened in scope and re-conceptualized in greater complexity. Trends in the misconduct of transnational corporations and repression as a tool of state reproduction of global capital have challenged critical sociologists and other scholars to revisit and rethink their paradigmatic foundations. Issues such as civil rights, once seen more narrowly in a national context, now become increasingly defined by global conventions and new, “universalizing” human rights terminologies. The links between legal repression and global affairs also become increasingly apparent, making it necessary to reconcile contemporary criminology and socio-legal studies to the changing political economy of global capitalism. In short, everything begins to look different.
From a global perspective, the essential key to understanding and confronting social injustice invariably boils down to structured global inequalities and the social movements that respond to them. With regard to the latter, social and political activists are increasingly operating beyond and across state borders in what is commonly referred to as “transnational activism.” From Porto Alegre to Atlanta, the rise of World, Regional and National Social Forums is just one example of a broad range of transnational social movement activities organized by labor internationalists, federations of youth groups, international feminist networks, pan-indigenous movements, global environmental coalitions, poor people’s movements, religious social justice activists, and others. Technological developments in electronic communications, first developed by the military institutions of world superpowers and later utilized by transnational capital in the articulation of global commodity chains, have ironically helped to promote new and extremely agile forms of transnational social movement networking that continues to create more potent possibilities for global justice activism.
One persistent challenge we have as global scholar-activists is to struggle against the “19th Century inertia” and “nation fortress” paradigms that so frequently constrain our thinking about contemporary social relations. We must also use the critical tools at our disposal to confront the disinformation reproduced by transnational corporate-controlled media that so effectively serves to obfuscate, naturalize and legitimate the prevailing social relations of global capitalism. In this regard, we can learn a great deal from transnational social justice activists who have proved resilient in developing a counter- ideology of "alter-globalization." They have helped show with ever greater clarity that moving towards a more just world requires us to struggle against a historically particular and highly exploitative form of capitalist globalization.
Some recommended readings include:
William J. Chambliss, “Commentary.” SSSP Forum 26(1), 1995, 9.
Christopher Chase-Dunn, Global Formation: Structures of The World-Economy, revised second edition, Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998.
John G. Dale, “In Dire Straits: Why Big Oil Needs Transnational Regulation,” Journal of International Affairs 59: 1 (Fall/Winter), 2005, 288-295.
Zillah Eisenstein, Against Empire: Feminisms, Racism and the West, London: Zed Books Ltd., 2004.
J.K. Gibson-Graham, “Querying Globalization,” in The End of Capitalism (as we knew it): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy, Malden, MA and Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996, 120-147.
Manning Marable, “Globalization and Racialization,” Synthesis/Regeneration 39 (Winter), 2006. [Available online at: http://www.greens.org/s-r/39/39-06.html]
James Petras, The New Development Politics: The Age of Empire Building and New Social Movements, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2003.
Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy, 3rd edition, Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press, 2006.
Jai Sen, Anita Anand, Arturo Escobar and Peter Waterman, World Social Forum: Challenging Empires, New Delhi: Viveka Foundation, 2005. [Available online at: http://www.choike.org/nuevo_eng/informes/1557.html]
David A. Smith, ed., “Special Issue on Globalization and Social Problems,” Social Problems 48(4), 2001.
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World Economy in the Sixteenth Century, New York: Academic Press, 1974.