The Globalization of Political Violence

Globalization's Shadow

Richard Devetak, Christopher W. Hughes

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415425339
• eBook ISBN: 9781134094950
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Globalización

The events of the 11th of September 2001 revealed most dramatically that globalization has a shadow. While large sections of the world's population enjoy the perceived benefits of globalization, others seek to utilize globalization for their own politically violent purposes. If 9/11 demonstrated anything, it is that globalization can as readily facilitate violence and insecurity as it can produce stability, prosperity and political order.

This edited volume offers important new methodological and multi-disciplinary insights into the study of globalization and political violence. It brings together studies from various disciplines in order to address the precise nature of the relationship between globalization and political violence as it seeks to offer new theoretical and empirical understandings of the types of actors involved in political violence, either as perpetrators or victims.

Examples of the studies include the changing character of state militaries and state-to-state conflict under globalization, the emergence of 'new wars' fuelled by globalization, the role of state militaries in intervention, new forms of violence directed by states against refugees and anti-globalization protesters, the role of terrorist actors post-9/11, networks for the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and the rise of private military firms amongst others.

The Globalization of Political Violence will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, international relations, security studies and international political economy.

1 Globalization’s shadow

An introduction to the globalization of political violence

Richard Devetak

September 11 revealed most dramatically that globalization has a shadow. While some of the world’s citizens enjoy the benefits globalization brings, others seek to put globalization to their own politically violent purposes. If the terrible events of September 11 demonstrated anything, it is that globalization can as readily facilitate violence as it can produce peace, prosperity and political order.

The precise nature of the relationship between globalization and political violence, however, remains largely unstudied. Most studies of globalization, understandably perhaps, focus on the rise of new information and communication technologies and their transformative effects on societies. In general, it is the economic dimensions of globalization that have been widely discussed and analysed, particularly the globalization of production and finance, and the relationship between states and markets. This book was prompted by a sense that globalization is intimately connected with the changing sources of insecurity and changing intensities of violence in the contemporary world, despite the relatively scant attention paid to it. It seeks to subject the relationship between globalization and political violence to closer scrutiny. The questions behind this book are: Has globalization given rise to new forms of violence? And how, if at all, does globalization affect the character and intensity of violence?

This chapter presents a broad overview of the nexus between globalization and political violence. First, it will present a working definition of globalization. Second, it will rehearse arguments about the economic dimension of globalization, arguably the most visible side of globalization. Third, it will explain how violence has been understood in the study of politics and international relations. Fourth, it will examine how globalizing forces of political economy interact with localized violent conflicts in the so-called ‘new wars’. Fifth, the chapter analyses the changing character of security. Finally, the chapter briefly outlines the contributing chapters to this volume. Its primary aim is to elaborate the context in which questions about the globalization of political violence have been or might be raised in the study of international relations, and to draw some connections among the various chapters included here.

Globalization

Goods, capital, people, information and principled beliefs, as well as arms, drugs, criminals, terrorists and pollutants, now appear to traverse nation-state borders with greater ease and speed and in larger volume than ever before. A mountain of literature has been produced to affirm or deny the different ways in which these cross-border actors, activities and products are transforming the human condition. Whether or not, and if so the degree to which, globalization impinges on the everyday existence of individuals, societies, cultures and nation-states has become a central problematic of the contemporary humanities and social sciences. The very meaning of globalization, however, remains highly contested (Higgott, 2000). This book is less concerned with precisely or narrowly defining the term than with examining how phenomena subsumed under the noun ‘globalization’ are complicit with practices and structures of violence. Nevertheless, it is important to outline in broad terms how the term is understood in this introductory chapter.

One of the most comprehensive analyses of globalization is offered by David Held and colleagues in Global Transformations (1999: 16). To begin with, they define globalization as the ‘widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness’ made possible by new information, communication, and transportation technologies (ibid.: 15). To develop more fully this definition of globalization, they divide it into four spatio-temporal dimensions: extensity, intensity, velocity and impact. First, the concept of globalization implies that social, political and economic activities are increasingly extending across nation-state borders and, consequently, appear to give rise to a global plane of human relations. Second, this global or transnational connectedness intensifies because of the greater frequency and regularized patterns of interaction that form the transnationally embedded networks. Third, the growing extensity and intensity of global interconnectedness implies a speeding up of transnational interactions and processes. Fourth, globalization implies that the repercussion of decisions or events in one part of the planet can be felt elsewhere (what many now refer to as ‘action at a distance’), and that the impact will be magnified relative to the extensity, intensity and velocity of global interconnectedness (Held et al., 1999: 15).

All these dimensions combined produce what David Harvey (1989) calls ‘time—space compression’. Developments in the organization of capitalist modernity, borne by new technologies, appear to have altered the properties and coordinating functions of time and particularly space. Jan Aart Scholte (2000: 46), in a wide-ranging account, suggests that globalization has produced ‘far-reaching change in the nature of social space’. He defines globalization as ‘deterritorialization’, or differently stated, the growth of ‘supraterritorial’, ‘transworld’, or ‘transborder’ relations between people. The major consequence of globalization, in this account, is that territoriality is becoming a decreasingly significant factor in shaping social, political and economic interaction. Telephone, fax and internet communication, electronic banking and finance, and global ecological problems, among other things, transcend territoriality, he argues. Largely unconstrained by territoriality, these transborder phenomena take place increasingly on an apparently seamless plane of global or planetary social relations. According to Scholte (2000: 48), these deterritorialized and potentially global flows and activities mark a ‘distinct kind of space—time compression’ where space gives way to increased ‘placelessness’ and temporality gives way to simultaneity and instantaneity.

It is important, however, not to equate globalization entirely with deterritorialization. Attentive to processes of reterritorialization, Scholte (2000: 42) carefully qualifies his argument by referring to ‘relative deterritorialization’. ‘Global relations have substantially rather than totally transcended territorial space. They are partly rather than wholly detached from territorial logics’, he says (2000: 59). This is an important qualification to the ‘hyper-globalization’ thesis that declares the end of territoriality. As Christopher Hughes (2002: 425) rightly notes, ‘there is considerable territorial “drag” upon the free flow of globalization forces’ that any investigation of globalization must take into account. It is not just that states are reluctant to acquiesce completely to all global flows or that states are often the initiators and bearers of globalization, but that globalization often takes the form of reterritorialization since the ‘unbundling’ of territory that John Ruggie (1993) discusses is usually accompanied by new ‘bundling’ at different and multiple levels.

The key point here is that globalization’s effects do not manifest only at the global level. There are processes of globalization that, in Saskia Sassen’s (2003: 1) words, do not necessarily ‘scale at the global level as such’. She continues:

These processes take place deep inside territories and institutional domains that have largely been constructed in national terms in much … of the world. What makes these processes part of globalization even though localized in national, indeed subnational settings, is that they involve transboundary networks and formations connecting multiple local or “national” processes and actors, or involve the recurrence of particular issues or dynamics in a growing number of countries.

(Sassen, 2003: 2)

Understanding globalization in its various dimensions requires focusing not just on globally scaled practices, but on locally or nationally scaled ones that are inseparable from the set of global dynamics associated with globalization. Globalization therefore denotes a variegated social process; one which is unevenly diffused and materializes differently depending on local practices and structures. That globalization manifests itself at local, regional and global levels reinforces the point that globalization ought to be conceived in terms of the correlative processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Held and colleagues (1999) are equally attuned to globalization’s interplay of deterritorialization and reterritorialization. They too emphasize globalization’s intersection with other (non-global) levels of social activity. They do not presume that globalization functions in separation from other process levels, they suggest instead that more spatially delimited processes, such as localization, nationalization, regionalization and internationalization, stand in complex and dynamic relation with globalization (Held et al. 1999: 16), rather than being disconnected or opposed to it. It therefore remains important to maintain a focus on the strategic locales where global processes materialize, whether they be at the local, national, regional or global level.

The approach of Held and his collaborators is particularly useful because it enables a more historically sensitive account of globalization. It presupposes neither that globalization is completely new nor that it is nothing new. It also avoids hasty proclamations about the death of the state. Instead, it focuses on the particular historical form taken by globalization in different eras (Held et al., 1999: 413–31). It thereby allows us to answer with greater precision the question: What, if anything, is new about the forms globalization presently assumes? To answer this question we can assess the degrees of extensity, intensity, velocity and impact that characterize global interconnectedness at any point in time or across different aspects of social, political and economic life. Spatio-temporal dimensions are viewed as enduring features of human societies, but the degree to which these dimensions are ‘compressed’ or ‘stretched’ by technological innovations and social reorganization remains a matter of empirical research.

While global relations have not completely transcended territorial space, Scholte’s proposition that they have been substantially overcome in some dimensions of social activity is reasonable. Social relations may have detached themselves from territorial logics in some respects, but considerable reterritorializations remain evident, particularly in the state’s various reconfigurations. In the following section we review some of the ways that economic reorganization has given rise to deterritorialized, global social relations. Even the emerging global economic architecture, however, shows signs of intensifying violent social relations at national and subnational levels.

Economic globalization and polarization

There can be little doubt that forces unconstrained by territorial geography increasingly affect economic relations. One of the most notable features of globalization is, as Susan Strange (1996: 44) notes, change in the world economy’s production structure; ‘that is to say, in what goods and services are being produced, how, where and by whom’. According to Strange (1996) and others (Cerny, 1995; Held et al., 1999), the rise of transnational corporations (TNCs) and the advent of globalized systems of trade, production and finance have created a more integrated world economy than ever before. Although corporations have traded across national boundaries and continents for centuries, the volume, velocity and global reach of their operations and transactions today are unprecedented (Held et al., 1999).

TNCs presently account for two-thirds of world trade. Now that the world’s largest corporations have built global production, distribution and marketing networks, one-third of the world’s trade is intra-firm trade—the transfer of goods and services across nation-state borders, but within the same corporation. The greater wealth, technology and mobility of TNCs has fuelled the impression that they are ‘footloose’—able and willing to move location in search of better infrastructure, wage-levels, efficiency and profitability anywhere on the planet. Though this is greatly exaggerated, TNCs do have a capacity to relocate production and services and do exercise limited influence over governments seeking to lure foreign investment. Given that the annual revenue of the largest TNCs exceeds the gross domestic product of many mid-sized national economies, this should be unsurprising.

Instrumental to the globalization of production wrought by TNCs is the rise of global financial markets. Massive amounts of financial capital flow like quicksilver across the planet today. Foreign direct investment (FDI), international bank lending and international bonds, equities, derivatives and currency markets have all grown in their volume and intensity since the Bretton Woods system broke down in the 1970s. Foreign currency markets are perhaps the most indicative of globalization’s impact; over a trillion US dollars are traded daily in this digital economic space, mostly through the financial capitals of London, New York and Tokyo. The digital character of capital today means that governments and their central banks are increasingly unable or unwilling to control capital flows across state borders (see Cerny, 1993; Helleiner, 1996; Kapstein, 1994).

The reach, intensity, mobility and impact of TNCs and financial markets explains why so much attention has been paid to the relationship between states and markets (Strange, 1988). The pressure on states to compete internationally has led them to liberalize and deregulate their national economies, opening them up to global forces and market disciplines. This has been neoliberalism’s primary objective. Neoliberalism—the ideology most closely aligned with globally mobile capital—holds to the conviction that markets are more effective instruments for social organization than states. The restructuring of domestic economies (through privatization, liberalization and deregulation) to accommodate global commercial pressures has occurred at the behest of neoliberalism. Following the states’ fiscal crisis of the 1970s, governments have been encouraged to relinquish redistributive and regulatory functions that were integral to the national welfare state.

Shorn of their wide array of traditional functions, states appear to have become little more than enforcers of decisions made by world markets and private authorities. Indeed, as Rodney Bruce Hall and Thomas Biersteker (2002: 4) claim, private authorities do many of the things traditionally assigned exclusively to the state. States are increasingly caught up in systems of global governance that include multilateral economic institutions like the World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as private authorities like credit-rating agencies and international commercial arbiters. As Tim Sinclair has shown, the creation of a system of global economic governance places great pressure on states to conform to neoliberal policy norms in national economic management. Policy debates now take place within the narrowing parameters of fiscal rectitude developed out of neoliberal ideologies (Sinclair, 1994, 2000).

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries in particular are relinquishing their power and authority over cross-border financial and economic transactions to private corporations and global regulators in order to reduce frictions and costs. This has led some commentators to speak of the nation-state’s demise in the face of a ‘borderless world’ (Ohmae, 1990). While there can be little doubt that economic globalization is tremendously powerful, it is wrong to assume that nation-states are dying. They are, as we have already emphasized, transforming; relinquishing certain economic roles and functions while retaining others (Clark, 1999; Evans, 1997; Held et al. 1999). As Strange (1996: 44–5) reminds us, ‘It was not that the TNCs stole or purloined power from the government of states. It was handed to them on a plate—and, moreover, for “reasons of state”’. This is true at least for the wealthy industrialized countries, where the vast bulk of trade takes place.

The globalization of trade, production and finance suggest that human social relations are increasingly being detached or disembedded from the geographical territory of the nation-state. To the degree that something like a ‘supraterritorial’ space, to use Scholte’s (2001) term, outside and beyond the state, is coming into being, the way human societies function and interconnect are being reshaped. Some of globalization’s more optimistic proponents believe that, by inaugurating a ‘borderless world’ and encouraging convergence around key neoliberal norms, it is making violent conflict less likely because of complex entanglements and greater interdependence. The alternative view is that, despite some sectors converging, globalization is uneven in its impact and benefits. It may indeed be creating a borderless world in some respects, but not equally and not for all. The story for developing countries is very different to that of the OECD countries. They too are touched by globalization, but in different ways. More often than not, they appear to be passive subjects of globalization rather than ‘globalizers’; but as we shall see, things are more complicated than that.

A point made by many critics is that economic globalization produces, at best, mixed results in the global South. Christopher Hughes (2002: 428) identifies three negative effects: ‘economic exclusion for states and individuals’, ‘economic rivalry among states and their citizens for scarce economic resources’, and ‘economic dislocation within states’. All these effects, he says, exacerbate pre-existing vulnerabilities inherent to developing countries by dint of their colonial and Cold War histories (Hughes, 2002).

Though multilateral economic institutions like the WTO, IMF and World Bank were built to address the global South’s vulnerabilities, they appear to have had limited success in ameliorating the situation of growing inequality both within and between states (Gill, 1995; Hurrell and Woods, 1995). Instead, the World Bank’s structural adjustment programmes and the IMF’s stabilization measures simply reproduce material inequality under the guise of what Stephen Gill calls the ‘new constitutionalism’. The restructuring of states ‘along market-driven lines’, says Gill,

tends to generate a deepening of social inequality, a rise in the rate and intensity of the exploitation of labour, growth in social polarization, gender inequality, a widespread sense of social and economic insecurity, and, not least, pervasive disenchantment with conventional political practice.

(Gill 1995: 420)

Economic globalization’s impact on developing countries is particularly acute. It may be true, as some have argued, that the only thing worse than being globalized is not to be globalized, but this is cold comfort for countries forced to trade off public health and education, poverty alleviation and environmental protection against fiscal discipline.

Critics of the neoliberal or ‘Washington consensus’ argue that gover...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface and acknowledgements
• 1 Globalization’s shadow
• 2 Globalization and military force(s)
• 3 Cosmopolitanism and military intervention
• 4 Globalization and political violence
• 5 International legal responses to weapons proliferation
• 6 The globalization of violence against refugees
• 7 Old violences, new challenges
• 8 The state, its failure and external intervention in Africa
• 9 Post-conflict recovery
• 10 Antipodal terrorists?
• 11 ‘Viva nihilism!’
• Bibliography