In this far-ranging and penetrating work, Denise Ferreira da Silva asks why, after more than five hundred years of violence perpetrated by Europeans against people of color, is there no ethical outrage? Rejecting the prevailing view that social categories of difference such as race and culture operate solely as principles of exclusion, Silva presents a critique of modern thought that shows how racial knowledge and power produce global space. Looking at the United States and Brazil, she argues that modern subjects are formed in philosophical accounts that presume two ontological moments—historicity and globality—which are refigured in the concepts of the nation and the racial, respectively. By displacing historicity’s ontological prerogative, Silva proposes that the notion of racial difference governs the present global power configuration because it institutes moral regions not covered by the leading post-Enlightenment ethical ideals—namely, universality and self-determination. By introducing a view of the racial as the signifier of globalit y,Toward a Global Idea of Race provides a new basis for the investigation of past and present modern social processes and contexts of subjection. Denise Ferreira da Silva is associate professor of ethnic studies at University of California, San Diego.

A Global Idea outlines how youth—as shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responses—became a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a "global youth development complex," a diverse transnational network of state, private sector, civil society, and international development aid organizations that worked through key urban areas such as Washington, DC, Amman, and Dubai. In its analysis of the arrival, extension, and embedding of the youth development complex in the Middle East during this period, A Global Idea addresses a broader question that is of global and not just regional concern. How are certain ideas that are central to the working and reproduction of global capitalism able to travel the world so that they are found virtually everywhere?

During the last three decades, corporations allied with scientists and universities, national and regional governments, and international financial institutions have, through a variety of mechanisms associated with neo-liberal globalization, acted to dispossess large proportions of the world's population of their commons' resources and enclose them for profit making. In response, throughout the global South and in the cities of the global North, large numbers of people have formed movements to defend the commons in all their variety. The idea of the commons has thus emerged as a global idea, and commons have emerged as sites of conflict around the world. The essays in this forum assess strategically the situations of selected commons in a variety of diagnostic sites where they exist, the ways in which they are being transformed by the incursions of capital and state, and the ways in which they are becoming the locus of struggle for those who depend on them to survive. Donald M. Nonini is Professor of Anthropology and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He has published numerous books, articles, and book chapters on Southeast Asian state formation, the cultural politics of Chinese transnationalism in and from Southeast Asia, and local politics in the southern United States. Recent articles include "Diasporas and Globalization" (2005) and "Indonesia Seen by Its Outside Insiders: Its Chinese Alters in Transnational Space" (2006). His latest book, co-written with Dorothy Holland et al., is Local Democracy Under Siege: Activism, Public Interests and Private Politics (2007).

Critics of globalization often portray neoliberalism as an extremist laissez-faire political-economic philosophy that rejects government any sort of government intervention in the domestic economy. Like most over-used terms, it is more complicated than this introductory sentence suggests. This volume seeks to move beyond these caricature depictions and definitions as well as the emotional rhetoric that has unfortunately dominated both the scholastic and political debate on neoliberalism and global market-oriented reform. This book emphasizes that there are in fact a variety of neoliberalisms that share a common emphasis on the role of the market. Beyond this however, its usages and applications appear much more varied according to the cultural, economic, political, and social context in which it is used. A host of eminent contributors, including Douglass C. North, Arthur T. Denzau, Thomas D. Willett, Mark Blyth, Colin Hay, Craig Parsons, and others provide a rigorous assessment of the significance of neoliberal ideas on economic policy. Through their detailed international case studies the contributors to this book show how varied its impact has in fact been and the result is a book that will stimulate further debate in this most controversial of subject matters. Ravi K. Roy is a Research Scholar at the Claremont Institute for Economic Policy Studies. Arthur T. Denzau is Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. He is also a Research Associate at the Center for American Business at Washington University (St. Louis).Thomas D. Willett is Horton Professor of Economics at Claremont Graduate University. He is also Director of the Claremont Institute for Economic Policy Studies

The result of a lifetime of research and contemplation on global phenomena, this book explores the idea of humanity in the modern age of globalization. Tracking the idea in the historical, philosophical, legal, and political realms, this is a concise and illuminating look at a concept that has defined the twentieth century.

With the stagnation of the Doha Round of multilateral talks, trade liberalisation is increasingly undertaken through free trade agreements. Gabriel Siles-Brügge examines the EU's decision following the 2006 'Global Europe' strategy to negotiate such agreements with emerging economies. Eschewing the purely materialist explanations prominent in the field, he develops a novel constructivist argument to highlight the role of language and ideas in shaping EU trade policy. Drawing on extensive interviews and documentary analysis, Siles-Brügge shows how EU trade policymakers have privileged the interests of exporters to the detriment of import-competing groups, creating an ideational imperative for market-opening. Even during the on-going economic crisis the overriding mantra has been that the EU's future well-being depends on its ability to compete in global markets. The increasingly neoliberal orientation of EU trade policy has also had important consequences for its economic diplomacy with the developing economies of the African, Caribbean and Pacific group of states.

This book is a history of European interpretations of the gift from the mid-seventeenth to the early twentieth century. Reciprocal gift exchange, pervasive in traditional European society, disappeared from the discourse of nineteenth-century social theory only to return as a major theme in twentieth-century anthropology, sociology, history, philosophy and literary studies. Modern anthropologists encountered gift exchange in Oceania and the Pacific Northwest and returned the idea to European social thought; Marcel Mauss synthesized their insights with his own readings from remote times and places in his famous 1925 essay on the gift, the starting-point for subsequent discussion. The Return of the Gift demonstrates how European intellectual history can gain fresh significance from global contexts.