Radical globalisation

Abstract

Globalisation is difficult to conceptualise because it has always existed in some form-people have always travelled, goods have moved, money has circulated, and information flowed. In T. L. Friedman’s dual view of the globalising world, power to consume is the true representative of modernity, and the spread of fast food and information technology is equivalent to emancipation. Critiquing the post-war communists, revolutionaries, and socialists, who according to J. Bhagwati understand globalisation as the new phase of capitalism and hence direct the trauma of their “vanished dream” towards it. The politics of thinking about globality in the approaches reaffirm orientalist imaginations of the Middle Eastern cauldron painted simplistically in terms of a “Judeo-Christian West” and the “Islamic world”. Radical globalisation means transcending our conceptual container-boxes to speak of exploitative reality simultaneously as markets, mergers, financial crisis, drone strikes, displaced slums, occupied Palestine, trafficked bodies, deposed migrants, and stigmatised Muslims.