Globalization in The Books Store

• Fully revised and updated with new material on economic globalization, the role of media and religion in cultural globalization, and the link between environmentalism and the globalization of social problems
  
• Includes a wide variety of perspectives on globalization and captures some of the fault lines in current debates
  
• Stimulates discussion by including provocative contemporary works and by structuring sections around arguments that serve as connecting theme

This unique reader goes beyond the traditional concept of international relations as simply interactions between states. It instead addresses all the players in the current global political scene, from international companies and intergovernmental organizations to traditional states and terrorist organizations.

Global Politics blends conceptual writings on international relations with current events coverage from journalistic sources. Case materials are drawn from all major geographic regions in order to emphasize the global nature of these issues in the post-Cold War period. Each chapter approaches the key topics first from a scholarly/theoretical view, then follows with readings presenting a news/current events context. The readings provide a stimulus for informed debate and discussion, and they encourage students to view daily events as part of a larger process of change.

• Up-to-date readings, editorials, and news items drawn from a distinctive blend of scholarly and journalistic sources keep students informed of the latest international issues and events.
• Each chapter is framed by an brief essay at the beginning and a series of topics for consideration at the close. This technique creates a context for the reading and provides a starting point for class discussions.

Global Issues, Local Arguments: Readings for Writing features high-interest arguments on significant global issues and emphasizes their connection to readers’ lives.

Engages readers through high interest argument readings while encouraging critical thinking skills, strengthen abilities to analyze and synthesize, and build writing skills that can bring about change. Nine significant global issues: Employment Outsourcing, Free Trade, Immigration, Culture, Terrorism, Human Rights, Water Rights, Global Heath, and Global Food Supply.

General Interest

A wheel turns because of its encounter with the surface of the road; spinning in the air it goes nowhere. Rubbing two sticks together produces heat and light; one stick alone is just a stick. In both cases, it is friction that produces movement, action, effect. Challenging the widespread view that globalization invariably signifies a "clash" of cultures, anthropologist Anna Tsing here develops friction in its place as a metaphor for the diverse and conflicting social interactions that make up our contemporary world.

She focuses on one particular "zone of awkward engagement"--the rainforests of Indonesia--where in the 1980s and the 1990s capitalist interests increasingly reshaped the landscape not so much through corporate design as through awkward chains of legal and illegal entrepreneurs that wrested the land from previous claimants, creating resources for distant markets. In response, environmental movements arose to defend the rainforests and the communities of people who live in them. Not confined to a village, a province, or a nation, the social drama of the Indonesian rainforest includes local and national environmentalists, international science, North American investors, advocates for Brazilian rubber tappers, UN funding agencies, mountaineers, village elders, and urban students, among others--all combining in unpredictable, messy misunderstandings, but misunderstandings that sometimes work out.

Providing a portfolio of methods to study global interconnections, Tsing shows how curious and creative cultural differences are in the grip of worldly encounter, and how much is overlooked in contemporary theories of the global.