Santos and the Difficulty of Sustainable Resistance

Abstract

States play ambivalent roles in contemporary processes associated with economic globalization. On the one hand, they actively participate in the construction of the rules and institutions intended to bind the hands of governments far into the future. In this way, states commit to not act in ways that impede market processes within and across national borders. On the other hand, states are expected to ensure that strategies of self-limitation are complemented by state supports that assist in, and even legitimate, pre-commitments of self-limitation. These supports may take the form of police action to suppress resistance by a mobilized populace or measures for societal self-protection so long as they do not lie beyond the hegemonic norm (Tarullo, 1987, p. 569). As has been noted by others (Weiss, 2005a; Sassen, 2006, p. 229), accompanying processes of deregulation are those of re-regulation. In an age of economic globalization, state functions do not entirely recede into the background, instead, states continue to play critical roles in the structuration of economic globalization.