Enacting Globalization consists of a rich set of papers with a variety of disciplinary perspectives, focusing on Globalization and its portrayal through International Integration as manifested by its myriad flows such as people, trade, capital and knowledge flows.

Unusual coming from a leftist perspective, this book argues that those who care for social justice should seek more globalization and not try to prevent its development or roll it back.

While ports are traditionally considered national infrastructure sites that connect states to global markets, special economic zones and past free ports are portrayed as threats to national sovereignty. This book calls these narratives into question as it explores the history of planning Mumbai’s ports and free zones during periods of global and regional transition from the British Raj, to national independence, to economic liberalization. The book opens with a study of an unsuccessful plan hatched by merchants in 1833 to make Bombay a free port to deal with an emerging British India and the advent of free trade. The book ends with how India’s current special economic zones and emphasis on port expansion are part of broader goals to reposition India in transregional Asian trade, to connect Mumbai with northern India, and to enact local plans for a global city that threaten the very port that first connected Mumbai to the world. To understand the functionality of these port and zone projects beyond typical policy prescriptions, this book proposes portals of globalization as a spatial format that fosters processes of reterritorialization.

Focusing on the intersection between globalization and migration, this powerful text traces a dynamic, contradictory process that has set the world in motion and incorporated millions of migrants into an economic market whose dimensions are unprecedented in human history. Eliot Dickinson emphasizes recent developments in global politics, such as the massive number of refugees from wars in the Middle East who are now seeking asylum in Europe; the “Fortress Europe” mentality illustrated on the Italian island of Lampedusa; the heart-wrenching humanitarian challenge of Mexican and Central American children arriving alone in the United States; and the effects of climate change and environmental destruction on international migration. Today, with the collaboration of compliant governments and elites in the peripheral countries of the Global South, multinational corporations continue to flout regulations, destroy the environment, and take advantage of the large number of displaced, unemployed workers. While globalization is eliminating barriers between countries and making it easier for goods and capital to move around the world, the industrialized countries of the Global North are simultaneously putting up barriers to people and making it harder for them to migrate. This timely and provocative book explains how we have arrived at this paradoxical point in history and critically examines why governments are enacting policies that protect borders instead of people.

Scholars of different schools have extensively analyzed world systems as networks of communication under the fashionable heading `globalization.' Our collected new research pushes the argument one step further. Globalization is not a homogenization of all social life on earth. It is a heterogeneous process that connects the global and the local on different levels. To understand these contemporary developments this book employs innovative concepts, strategies of research, and explanations. Globalization is a metaphor for different borderstructures, new borderlines, and conditions of membership, which emerge in a global world-system. As a world-system expands it incorporates new territories and new peoples. The process of incorporation creates frontiers or boundaries of the world-system. These frontiers or boundary zones are the locus of resistance to incorporation, ethnogenesis, ethnic transformation, and ethnocide.

This edited volume brings together cutting-edge studies from emerging scholars of East/Southeast Asia who explore the role of mobile media in the contemporary transformation of the region’s social intimacies, from the romantic to the familial to the communal. By providing a regional and transnational overview of such studies, it affords new insights into how these mobile technologies have contributed to the rise of ‘glocal intimacies’. This pertains to the normalisation and intensification of how people’s relationships of closeness are entangled in the ever-shifting and constantly negotiated flows between global modernity and local everyday life. In providing case studies of mobile media and glocal intimacies, the chapters in the volume attend to a broad range of countries that include China, Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, and Taiwan. This illustrates the differing ways in which mobile media might be embedded in the region’s divergent articulations of social intimacies, which reflect the ongoing tensions between Western and Asian imaginaries of modernity. The chapters also discuss a wide array of mobile media that people use, from social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, to messaging apps like KakaoTalk and WhatsApp, to dating apps like Tinder and Blued. This allows for a mapping out of the different levels of impact that mobile media might have on social intimacies in a region that contains some of the most technologically advanced as well as the most technologically behind societies in the world. In summary, this book allows readers to take a comparative approach to understanding the complexity of the glocal intimacies that are emerging from the ways people in Asia use mobile media to reconfigure their local ties and to enact global relationships. This volume will benefit students, academics, and researchers who are keen in media and communication, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, and Asian studies. “This exciting and much-needed book will greatly advance our efforts to decolonise media and communications research. The chapters offer empirically rich and nuanced accounts that challenge the dominant paradigms about mediated intimacy.” Mirca Madianou, Goldsmiths, University of London “This collection develops the original concept of ‘glocal intimacies’ to describe how mobile media have become a crucial site where new social intimacies are enacted, reinforced and transformed in Asia. It introduces fresh empirical research from emerging scholars to furnish deep theoretical insights into these imaginaries and practices.” Audrey Yue, National University of Singapore

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.