The End of History and the Last Man

From a world history perspective, the most noticeable trend in the history of the late 19th century was the domination of Europeans over Non­Europeans. This domination took many forms ranging from economic penetration to outright annexation. No area of the globe, however remote from Europe, was free of European merchants, adventurers, explorers or western missionaries. Was colonialism good for either the imperialist or the peoples of the globe who found themselves subjects of one empire or another? A few decades ago, the answer would have been a resounding no. Now, in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, the more or less widespread discrediting of Marxist and Leninist analysis, and the end of the Cold War, political scientists and historians seem willing to take a more positive look at Nineteenth Century Imperialism. One noted current historian, Niall Ferguson has argued that the British Empire probably accomplished more positive good for the world than the last generation of historians, poisoned by Marxism, could or would concede. Ferguson has argued that the British Empire was a \" liberal \" empire that upheld international law, kept the seas open and free, and ultimately benefited everyone by ensuring the free flow of trade. In other words, Ferguson would find little reason to contradict the young Winston Churchill's assertion that the aim of British imperialism was to: give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. It should come as no surprise that Ferguson regards the United States current position in the world as the natural successor to the British Empire and that the greatest danger the U.S. represents is that the world will not get enough American Imperialism because U.S. leaders often have short attention spans and tend to pull back troops when intervention becomes unpopular. It will be very interesting to check back into the debate on Imperialism about ten years from now and see how Niall Ferguson's point of view has fared! The other great school of thought about Imperialism is, of course, Marxist. For example, Marxist historians like E.J. Hobsbawm argue that if we look at the l9th century as a great competition for the world's wealth and …

The New Imperialism

Why Men Rebel was first published in 1970 on the heels of a decade of political violence and protest not only in remote corners of Africa and Southeast Asia, but also at home in the United States. Forty years later, the world is riveted on uprisings in the Middle East, and the United States has been overtaken by a focus on international terrorism and a fascination with citizen movements at home and abroad. Do the arguments of 1970 apply today? Why Men Rebel lends new insight into contemporary challenges of transnational recruitment and organization, multimedia mobilization, and terrorism.

Why Men Rebel

세계화가 과연 하나의 독립변수로 사용하기에 충분할 정도로 그 의미가 명확하게 규명된 과학적 개념인가의 여부는 학계의 지속적인 의문으로 남아 있다. 특히 최근에는 현저하게 드러나고 있는 각종 반세계화 현상을 바탕으로 세계화에 대한 반론이 거세지고 있으며 일부 세계화론 주창자들조차 ‘현실’로서 세계화 현상에 대한 회의적 시각을 표출하고 있어 그 의문은 더욱 커지고 있다. 이에 따라 세계화를 설명 변수로 삼는 모든 연구 영역에서 세계화의 의미와 세계화와 관련된 연구 성과를 반추해 볼 필요성도 커지고 있다. 본 연구의 목적은 세계화의 의미 분석을 바탕으로 세계화를 안보환경 변화의 독립변수로 삼는 연구의 동향을 분석하고 연구의 방향을 제시하는데 있다. 세계화는 그 설명적 가치와 규범적 판단을 둘러싸고 논란이 계속되고 있는 개념이다. 세계화는 세계화론자를 중심으로 발전되어 온 개념이지만 이들 사이에서도 개념에 대한 합의는 존재하지 않는다. 세계화는 가장 단순하게는 하나의 현상 혹은 사건으로 간주되기도 하지만, 세계화의 본질을 규명하려는 입장에서는 세계화의 원인과 영향에 대한 인과관계는 물론 사회관계 본질이나 권력관계 변화를 적시하는 개념으로 취급하여 왔다. 그러나 세계화를 개념화하려는 노력은 수많은 하부 현상을 단일 요소로 설명해야 하며, 역으로 개념 속에 혼재되어 있는 세계화의 원인, 결과, 설명 및 규범적 판단 요소를 단순화해야 한다는 과제를 안고 있다. 특히 원인과 결과가 혼재되어 있는 세계화 개념은 현상 분석을 위한 설명체제 구성에 가장 큰 장애요인이 되고 있다. 세계화와 안보와의 관계를 다루는 연구는 대체로 세계화에 관한 중도론적 입장에서 안보에 관한 낙관론을 피하고 새로운 위협을 제시하는데 초점을 맞추는데, 이러한 경향은 안보연구에서 세계화를 가장 단순한 수준에서 정의하는 데에서 비롯된다. 그러나 지나치게 단순한 세계화 개념을 적용하는 안보연구는 질적으로 새로운 현상인 세계화를 여전히 국가중심적 시각에서 다루고 모든 안보위협을 테러리즘의 문제로 축소하려는 환원주의의 문제를 야기한다. 이러한 문제를 극복하기 위해서는 세계화 개념의 불완전성을 염두에 둔 세계화 개념에 대한 접근과 일관된 세계화 개념 적용이 요구된다. 또한 세계화 현상으로부터 직접적인 안보 사안을 도출하는 노력에서 한 차원 더 나아가 안보연구의 새로운 방향을 제시해 줄 수 있는 안보환경 변화의 전체적 특성을 분석하는 포괄적 연구가 요구된다.

세계화(globalization)와 안보 연구

to the rise of a neoliberalism which has both commoditized otherness and stripped away the buffers of the welfare state. The introduction establishes that, although Brennan critiques the formation of \"theory,\" he is not dismissive of theory in principle; he actually is deeply invested in a trajectory of theory, embodied in the Hegel-Marx line: Bakhtin, Lukács, Benjamin, Adorno, Marcuse, Gramsci, Bourdieu, and Said. Lamenting the predominance of the Nietszchèan line—in which he includes Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, Baudrillard, Lyotard, Derrida, Vattimo, Negri, and Virilio—Brennan blasts the celebratory and uncritical use of \"poststructuralism's infinitely interchangeable metaphors of dispersal: decentered subjects, nomadism, ambivalence, the supplement, rhizomatic identity, and the constructed self—terms whose sheer quantity nervously intimates a lack of variation.\" At such polemical textual moments, we feel the full force of Brennan's bile at a discipline that has abnegated its responsibilities; at the same time, the polemic (as all polemics do) tends to create the fantasy of an other whose totality is self-evident and whose heterogeneity is merely superficial. What, indeed, about the politically engaged work of Cary Nelson, BarrettWatten, Michael Bibby, andMichael True, among others, not to mention the intellectuals left of Noam Chomsky, whose dissident work may share the anarchism of the academic left, but whose consequences have been real and whose relationship to dissenting movements in the US and throughout the world is undeniable? (Chomsky gets three short mentions in this book.) Brennan's relative exclusion of contemporary examples of Gramscian intellectuals actively engaged with social movements makes Wars ofPosition a difficult book, because it offers few models for emerging from the malaise that the academy seems to Detailfrom cover suffer from. Yet Brennan is clearly at his best when he is arguing against the received versions of theorists, engaging his Hegelian impulses to reverse the unexamined consensus. His critical reassessment of Orientalism (1978), for example, suggests that Said's foundational text on the Western fantasies of the Middle East has been misread as a Foucauldian project; rather, for Brennan, while Orientalism clearly borrows heavily from Foucault, Said ultimately is arguing against the poststructuralist doxa that underwrite much of contemporary postcolonial theory. Said, in Brennan's reading, is a crucial figure not only for his resistance to the sacred cows of poststructuralism, but also for his embrace of the public responsibilities of the intellectual.

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Spaces of Global Capitalism: Towards a Theory of Uneven Geographical Development

Impacto de la crisis en el derecho a una alimentación sana y saludable. Informe SESPAS 2014

The outbreak of the 15M or indignado movement in Spain in 2011 was the biggest episode of social unrest since the end of the Transition in the 1970s. Its emergence caught the political parties, media, trade unions and the most important community-based organisations and pre-existing social movements off guard. It targeted those who were identified as responsible for the recession and how it was handled – politicians and bankers –, and represented a global criticism of the existing political system and institutional framework. The 15M was not a youth movement, but a general movement criticising the current economic model, though it did have a large youth component in its initial stages. It was plural and diverse, and a wide broad spectrum of criticism and degrees of radicality and political awareness coexisted in the squares and camps. In general terms, the links between the indignados and the labour movement were weak and marked by mutual mistrust. The 15M movement was a milestone in the political traject...

Spain: the indignados rebellion of 2011 in perspective

Since 15 May 2011 Spain has progressively entered a political and regime crisis in which the main institutional pillars of the political system constructed in 1977-1978 during the transition from the Franco dictatorship to parliamentary democracy suffered from serious wear. This can be analysed following Gramsci's notion of hegemony crisis whose main features fit well with the current situation in Spain. The regime crisis has passed through different stages – the last being the emergence and rise in the polls of Podemos, which emerged in a context marked by the deepening of the crisis and the difficulty of securing significant social victories. To understand the meaning of this current regime crises it is useful to read history, following Walter Benjamin as an open process full of bifurcations with no linear trajectory. Spanish regime crisis opens for the first time since the seventies the possibility of a social and political change whose final sense is still uncertain.

Spain: from the indignados rebellion to regime crisis (2011-2016)

The coronavirus crisis has put the discussion of the notion of crisis itself back at the center of the debate. The concept of crisis is derived from the Greek verb krino that means to “separate,” “choose,” “judge,” or “decide,” As Koselleck (1988, 2012) has explained its different meanings in ancient Greece, all somehow suggested the absence of time and a moment of truth and decision—its medical Hippocratic meaning being the one that historically prevailed, referring to the critical moment when illness could get worse and lead to death or could ease off and lead to recovery. Crisis was, in that sense, a turning point with opposing possible outcomes. A crisis marks a milestone in a society’s trajectory, whose depth is proportional to the crisis itself. Returning to the original meaning of the term is useful to take into account that every crisis is settled by a process of reorganization of social (and geopolitical) relations, whose concrete outcome depends on the balance of forces between the different sociopolitical projects at stake. That is the crucial question regarding the debates on the world after the pandemic. In its contemporary conventional uses in politics and social sciences, crisis no longer refers to this turning point towards different dénouements, but rather a moment when a given situation worsens. Crisis thus merely describes the opposite pathological state to the normal. But the fact is that the normality of capitalism is already pathological, first because it regularly leads to crises and second because it creates everyday suffering and inequality. Walter Benjamin (1999[1927-1940]:473, [N9a,1]) in his Passagenwerk noted this everyday twosided pathological normality of capitalism when writing that “the concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe. It is not an ever-present possibility but what in each case is given. Thus Strindberg (in 10 Damascus?): ‘hell is not something that awaits us, but this life here and now’.” The topological figure of bifurcation is critical to understand the historic meaning of crises as they represent a turning point towards the uncertain where alternative paths become possible. Several authors have recently made use of the concept to explain the dilemmas of global capitalism in terms of competing future possibilities. The cases of Wallerstein, Balibar, and Bensaïd are noteworthy. All of them rest upon certain usages of mathematics bifurcation theory associated to catastrophe theory, whose main exponent was mathematician René Thom Dialectical Anthropology https://doi.org/10.1007/s10624-020-09613-2

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Notes on corona crisis and temporality.

Subaltern classes' internationalism has a long history. The 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century saw the rise of a new internationalism because of the emergence of the antiglobalisation movement. It was a short-lived movement, but that gave birth to a new set of strong internationalist activity. In 2011, there emerged a new international wave of protest by both the Indignados and the Occupy movements. These new movements, however, have developed relatively low levels of cross-border activity compared to the antiglobalisation movement, although it has brought a new internationalist drive.

Josep Maria Antentas

Papers

Impacto de la crisis en el derecho a una alimentación sana y saludable. Informe SESPAS 2014

Spain: the indignados rebellion of 2011 in perspective

Spain: from the indignados rebellion to regime crisis (2011-2016)

Notes on corona crisis and temporality.

Internationalist Challenges: Antiglobalisation, Occupy, and Indignados