Globalization and Development: Issues and Challenges

Since the era of European colonialism and the onset of industrial capitalism, the world has seen the expansion and deepening of social, cultural, political, and economic relations across time and space. Today, this process of globalization has increased in speed and reach, such that, our daily activities are affected significantly by practices and decisions made in distant places. The impacts of the accelerated mobility of people, commodities, information, and ideas on socio-economic development are unevenly distributed geographically, privileging and depriving some at the same time. This course examines globalization’s contradictory effects, especially as they are lived and felt by people in the Global South. We will focus our attention on some of the following issues: new gendered and racialized patterns of labor, inequality among nations, climate change and ecological sustainability, criminal violence, international migration, and social movement responses to globalization from above.