Monthly Archive for March, 2011

Bamboo Capitalism

Published on March 29, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From The Economist

Few would deny that China has been the economic superstar of recent years. Thanks to its relentless double-digit annual growth, it has become the world’s second-largest economy and in many ways the most dynamic. Less obvious is quite what the secret of this success has been. It is often vaguely attributed to “capitalism with Chinese characteristics”–typically taken to mean that bureaucrats with heavy, visible hands have worked much of the magic. That, naturally, is a view that China’s government is happy to encourage.

But is it true? Of course, the state’s activity has been vast and important. It has been effective in eradicating physical and technological obstacles: physical, through the construction of roads, power plants and bridges; technical, by facilitating (through means fair and foul) the transfer of foreign intellectual property. Yet China’s vigour owes much to what has been happening from the bottom up as well as from the top down. Just as Germany has its mighty Mittelstand, the backbone of its economy, so China has a multitude of vigorous, (very) private entrepreneurs: a fast-growing thicket of bamboo capitalism.

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Teodorin’s World

Published on March 28, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

By Ken Silverstein in Foreign Policy

The owner of the estate at 3620 Sweetwater Mesa Road, which sits high above Malibu, California, calls himself a prince, and he certainly lives like one. A long, tree-lined driveway runs from the estate’s main gate past a motor court with fountains and down to a 15,000-square-foot mansion with eight bathrooms and an equal number of fireplaces. The grounds overlook the Pacific Ocean, complete with swimming pool, tennis court, four-hole golf course, and Hollywood stars Mel Gibson, Britney Spears, and Kelsey Grammer for neighbors.

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Recently Published in The Global Studies Journal

Published on March 28, 2011 in Journal. 0 Comments

global

The latest issue of The Global Studies Journal includes:

What’s Worth Measuring? Rethinking the Narrative of Development

Published on March 20, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

by Misha Lepetic, in 3 Quarks Daily

By now the scrappiness of the emerging economies’ entrepreneurial class has become a recognized trope of the folklore of globalization. Starting with Muhammad Yunus’s initial investments in the microfinance concept, to Tata Motors’ Nano, Western observers are being treated to an ever-increasing flow of news celebrating how doughty innovators are operationalizing elegant solutions to sticky problems that developed nations have, for many decades now, attempted to solve with boatloads of aid money, much of which was eventually misspent, misappropriated or outright stolen by its recipients, their governments and/or various inexperienced or misguided middlemen.

Now, augmented by the newly formulated war-cries of sustainability and climate change, these kinds of innovations and the drive behind them seem to be taking on even greater importance. In these neo-liberal, post-regulation end-times, the narrative tells us: Let a thousand flowers bloom. But what is it that we really see, and will we get what we expect?

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The Global Studies Journal, Volume 3, Number 4 available

Published on March 17, 2011 in Journal. 0 Comments

global_frontThe fourth issue of Volume 3 of  The Global Studies Journal has now been published.

Papers included in Volume 3, Number 4:

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Zakaria’s World

Published on March 15, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

By Joseph S. Nye Jr., in Foreign Policy

Fareed Zakaria is one of our most perceptive analysts of America’s role in the world, and I generally agree with him. But in the case of his new special essay for Time, “Are America’s Best Days Behind Us?,” I think he paints too gloomy a picture of American decline.

Americans are prone to cycles of belief in decline, and the term itself confuses various dimensions of changing power relations. Some see the American problem as imperial overstretch (though as a percentage of GDP, the United States spends half as much on defense as it did during the Cold War); some see the problem as relative decline caused by the rise of others (though that process could still leave the United States more powerful than any other country); and still others see it as a process of absolute decline or decay such as occurred in the fall of ancient Rome (though Rome was an agrarian society with stagnant economic growth and internecine strife).

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Announcing Dr. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro as a 2011 Plenary Speaker

Published on March 2, 2011 in Conference. 0 Comments

We are pleased to announce that Dr. Gustavo Lins Ribeiro will join us in Rio de Janeiro as a plenary speaker for the 2011 Global Studies Conference.

Gustavo Lins Ribeiro holds his Ph. D. in Anthropology (City University of New York, 1988). He is currently a full Professor of Anthropology in the University of Brasilia; Level 1A Research Fellow of Brazil’s National Council of Scientific and Technological Develoment (CNPq). He was a visiting professor in several universities and research centers in Argentina, Colombia, Mexico and the U.S. He has done research and written on topics such as development, environmentalism, international migration, cyberculture, globalization and transnationalism. His doctoral dissertation on the construction of the Yacyreta Dam won the National Association of Graduate Programs in the Social Sciences 1989 Prize for the Best Doctoral Dissertation and was published in Argentina, Brazil and the United States. He has written and edited 14 volumes in Portuguese, Spanish and English, and more than 100 chapters and articles in different journals and books in Latin America, Europe, Asia and the U.S., in Portuguese, Spanish, English, Japanese, French and German. He was a member of the Advisory Council of the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (New York); Advisory Editor of Current Anthropology (Chicago); president of the Brazilian Association of Anthropology; a founder and the first chair of the World Council of Anthropological Associations. He is a co-chair of the Committee on World Anthropologies of the AAA and serves on more than 20 editorial boards of journals in Europe, the U.S. and Latin America, including the American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Anthropology Today, Journal des Anthropologues and Alteridades. His last books are the edited volume (with Arturo Escobar) “World Anthropologies. Disciplinary Transformations in Systems of Power” (Oxford/New York: Berg Publishers, 2006) and “The Capital of Hope”, in Portuguese, about the construction of Brasilia from the workers’ point-of-view (Brasilia: Edunb, 2008).

For more information about our plenary speakers, please visit our website .

Elisa P. Reis to Join Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference

Published on March 2, 2011 in Conference. 0 Comments

Please welcome Professor Elisa P. Reis to our plenary speaker line-up for the Fourth Annual Global Studies Conference.

Elisa Reis is a professor of Political Sociology at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. She holds her PhD in Political Science (MIT, US 1980); MA (1972) and BA (1967), Brazil; Post-graduate diploma in development sociology, ILADES, Chile (1968). Professor Reis is a fellow of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and of the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) as well as a visiting professor at University of California at San Diego, Columbia University, MIT and Ludwig Maximilians Universitat. Munich.

Author of more than 100 articles in Brazilian and international periodicals, some of her latest work includes “New Ways of Relating Authority and Solidarity: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations”, in The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology, Kalekin and Denis (eds.), Sage, 2009. Among her books, Elite Perceptions of Poverty and Inequality (ed. with M.Moore) Zed, 2005 has been very influential in poverty studies.

Some of Professor Reis’ selected administrative experiences include Secretary of the Brazilian Sociological Society (SBS), President of the National Association for the Social Sciences (ANPOCS), Vice-president of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (current), Chair of the Interdisciplinary Research Network for Studies on Social Inequality (NIED) (current), and Vice-president for Latin America of the Comparative Research on Poverty (CROP).

For more information on our plenary speakers, please visit our website .