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This chapter explores “anti-consumerist” critique and practice as articulated in a range of Western nations over the last two decades. It surveys the rise of a twenty-first-century consumption politics, identifying how it has coalesced around opposition to consumerism and overconsumption, while remaining elusive in the extent to which it advocates substantive social and economic change and in the degree to which it rejects or embraces consumption as an arena of agency. The chapter explores this ambiguity through discussion of two interconnected forms of recent consumption politics—“responsible” consumer choice and “alternative” enterprise—outlining the fractured and tenuous ways in which these practices speak of contestation and of the emancipatory in relation to consumption and consumer economies. The chapter concludes by recognizing the conceptual and ideological limits of contemporary consumption politics, while insisting also that it has significantly expanded the political and ethical sensibilities through which we understand the commodity and its impact.

This chapter focuses on research among internally displaced Afghan communities who had fled to Pakistan over the protracted periods of conflict and were then unable to return to their homes and are currently living in temporary accommodation. Drawing on interviews with forced migrants this chapter aims to explore their lived experiences. In doing so, it highlights the complexities of the decision-making processes that involuntary migrants undertake. Negative public discourses of Afghan refugees notwithstanding, they are the quintessential exemplars of a global migration crisis, given that the geopolitical situation in the region over the last three decades have compelled millions to flee their homes. In order to dispel the fears and distrust toward asylum-seekers this chapter shows the importance of producing accurate data based on the worldviews of the displaced as they are formulating their decisions to flee. This in turn enables us to challenge both the artificially constructed demonizing discourses centered on asylum-seekers as well as the refugees’ own retrospective accounts, which are sometimes at odds with their actual experiences.

After some 10 years in power and more than two years in control of several municipalities, the previously banned Tunisian Islamist party al-Nahda has had a unique trajectory as a Sunni Islamic political movement in the wake of the Arab uprisings. This chapter examines that trajectory from a local perspective, focusing on two popular districts of Greater Tunis, al-Tadamun and Douar Hisher, historic strongholds of al-Nahda. The aim is to understand the mutations through which this central actor has passed in Tunisia, examining the evolution of its social action and its repertoire of political legitimization. The chapter outlines the tensions marking its institutionalization in terms of generational dislocation and the alienation of its popular base. In doing so, it traces the recomposition of local power and its underlying arrangements in relegated urban margins 10 years after the fall of Ben Ali’s authoritarian regime.

The theme of the Anthropocene raises fundamental questions for how world politics is now to be understood. Geopolitics can now no longer take the context of the human drama for granted; transformations are afoot that are of humanity’s own making. Nature is increasingly being produced at the largest of scales, and political thinking has to come to terms with this new condition. Globalization is, it turns out, a profoundly physical process, not just a matter of trade and cultural change networked by communication technologies. The global economy is effectively a new geomorphic force at work in the biosphere. The Anthropocene thus provides a formulation for rethinking many things and is, as such, a profoundly useful category for new thinking about global studies.

American countries and cities are among the world’s most prone to gun-related violence. In 2017, the regional homicide rate hovered at 17.2 per 100,000 people, as compared to a global average of closer to 6.1 per 100,000. Rates in Central and South America are over 24 per 100,000 population. Just four countries—Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Venezuela—accounted for a quarter of all global gun-related deaths. Firearms on their own are not the cause of homicide or violent crime, but their abundance dramatically increases the risk of a lethal outcome. The sheer diversity and scale of arms and ammunition moving into Latin America constitutes a serious policy challenge. This chapter focuses on the normative dimensions of arms control and emphasizes the salient policy angles, including the necessity of additional border and custom controls, oversight of local arms production, and better controls and management of military, police, and private security arsenals. To responsibly control the problem, Latin America needs better enforcement of existing laws.

This chapter assesses how from early modernity to the present day, art has been a significant agent in the cultural transmission of globalization. It is a cultural legacy, however, that continues to be divided by a deep sense of ambivalence toward the question of how social imaginaries are delimited by the ubiquitous processes of global capital. The field of contemporary art is often entirely complicit with a culture of manufactured exclusivity and large profits, yet it also has its critical edge that has shown how the glossy allure of transnational capital obscures visions of other possible, less inequitable worlds. Other possible worlds have also appeared in art in a recent turn to the great, circulatory systems of the oceans as both the historical conduits of globalization and the channels through which we might envisage what kind of global imaginary will prevail in response to environmental crisis.

Throughout the past forty years various leaders from both major political parties in Australia have categorized the arrival by boat of people seeking asylum as a “crisis” and the people themselves as “illegal.” This is despite Australia being a signatory to the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and receiving relatively few people who seek asylum compared with many other countries. Punitive government policies and processes have further reinforced these representations, such that “crisis” and “illegal” can now be understood as both categories of analysis and practice. The repeated use of such categories may be helping to produce and reproduce prejudice and racism and obscure the needs and experiences of people seeking asylum.

The battle for the soul of Islam is about much more than countering political violence and suppressing political Islam. It is a long-drawn-out, decades-long battle for religious soft power in which multiple Middle Eastern and Asian states compete for recognition as leader of the Muslim world and to be drivers of a largely undefined “moderate,” tolerant, and pluralistic interpretation of an Islam that at a minimum engages in interfaith dialogue. The rivals employ religion to garner favor, empathy, and goodwill in the corridors of power in the United States and Europe, as well as among influential Jewish and Christian communities. At the same time, the battle for the soul of Islam is also a struggle to redefine what Islam represents in a 21st-century world.

Violence across borders has experienced a global transformation as a consequence of regional integration, especially in border regions where the presence of global crime networks exacerbates complementary asymmetries. In such cases, borders are transformed from predominantly national spaces of encountering and separation into hubs of world economic circuits—both legal and illegal. This transformation produces two important changes: on the one hand, borders become less geographically fixed and more fluid spaces; on the other hand, the central actor of illegal markets is no longer the contraband smuggler but rather a trafficker of persons, goods, and services from distant territories. The text addresses these dynamics and focuses on three topics: the relationship between borders and actors, the configuration of particular forms of border violence, and the security politics in South American countries.

This chapter analyzes President Obama and his Administration’s construction of Central American migrants as a crisis. Based on a close reading of letters to Congress, governmental Fact Sheets, speeches, and other written documents of the administration, the chapter argues that the language that initially established violence against migrants as the crux of the crisis simultaneously erased the role of the United States in supporting the conditions that are expelling migrants from their homelands. The faulty logic during a purported moment of crisis, moreover, made it possible to propose family detention centers and ramped-up enforcement as the main solutions. Central American refugees, therefore, are left with only their bodies to resist and to draw attention to the true crises: US intervention and nation-states’ long-term unwillingness to enforce human rights protections in the region.

Although the concept of “charismatic” leaders is commonplace in political discourse, many academics hold that the notion is vague and these leaders’ alleged appeal to voters untestable. This chapter sets out a conceptualization of such leaders, focusing on radical mission, personal presence, symbiotic hierarchy, and Manichean demonization. It then considers four broad theories about why charismatic leaders have notable effects (and why the radical right gathers support): socioeconomic change and crisis, political opportunity structures, cultural legitimation, and psychological affinities. While it is important not to overstate the powers of most leaders, the chapter concludes by arguing that we need to appreciate the role of “coterie” charisma over an inner core, helping to keep parties together. Moreover, charismatic leaders exert a centripetal appeal, particularly to authoritarians and/or those least interested in politics, creating a more differentiated following than the affective bond stressed in the classic Weberian model.

This chapter explores citizenship as an interdisciplinary concept of central interest in the field of global studies. The chapter outlines the general concept of citizenship and discusses how several circumstances related to globalization and its accompanying social and economic disparities, in addition to ongoing patterns of immigration and cultural change, have disrupted the civil, political, and social rights of modern citizenship and opened new lines of contestation over questions of “who belongs” within specific nation-states. Next, the chapter discusses global citizenship, tracing the progression of this specific concept in political thought and contemporary scholarship and then reckoning with several lines of critique that have questioned the feasibility and desirability of global citizenship. The chapter also examines how global citizenship and related ideas, such as global competency and global consciousness, have been employed within the endeavor of civic education.

For all its myriad debates, interpretations, and discussions, research on detailing and imagining civil society, global civil society, and associated social relations is constrained in how it conceives global social relations. There is confusion as to whether civil society and global civil society refer to an analytical concept or an actually existing reality or both simultaneously. This chapter adds a missing dimension to these discussions through engaging a critical dialogue or dialectics between concept and reality in civil society research on the nature and extent of civil society particularly as they relate to global governance and contestation. The theoretical and practical activities of civil society, seen through a dialectical lens of the world, are related in the conclusion to a greater understanding of movement and change through the processes of transversal hegemony.

Greenhouse gases emitted anywhere affect people everywhere, and they will do so for a very long time. Progress on an international response to climate change has been bedeviled by ethical, political, and economic fractures, highlighting the severe limitations of the Westphalian state system. Non-state actors have played a crucial role in negotiations; some are “internationalist,” whereas others are “globalist.” Climate change is inseparable from capitalism’s insatiable appetite for growth. The rise of China destabilizes previous understandings of the world, including those of global studies and world-systems analysis. There are signs of a new cosmopolitanism, although securitization of the climate threat works against it. The globality of the natural world calls for a rethinking of global studies.

The conventional narrative on the crisis of climate change and its links to migration sees the physical impacts of climate change—such as sea-level rise, drought, soil salinization, and floods—as driving massive human migration, increasing existing flows from the Global South to the Global North as people flee disasters and famine. Yet contradictory evidence demonstrates that the relationship between climate change and migration is not so simple. Africa is indeed the most vulnerable content to these impacts, but this extreme vulnerability arises from physical exposure and because of the interplay of numerous social, political, economic, and environmental factors. Moreover, migration dynamics related to the climate change crisis manifest in nonlinear, heterogeneous ways across subregions and countries. Thus, this chapter outlines the varying and multidimensional relationships between human mobility and climate change in Africa. It considers the threat of climate change to African settlement dynamics both presently and in the century to come, before providing an overview of climate change–migration dynamics and challenges throughout the continent.

There is widespread understanding that migration can represent an adaptive response to emerging and realized climate threats. However, the concept of “migration as adaptation” positions vulnerable populations as adaptive agents who can and even must migrate in response to climate change impacts, despite their often negligible contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. The Pacific islands region is widely viewed as an iconic site of climate change impacts and subsequent climate migration risk. This chapter discusses three Pacific countries—Fiji, Tuvalu, and Kiribati—and explores how people and government officials in these countries respond to the dynamic discursive, policy, social, and biophysical domains of “migration as climate change adaptation.”

This chapter is a synthetical one, drawing on previous work on knowledge production in the Arab world in the last decade. It contributes to the debate about how scholarship in the Arab region has struggled with some dichotomies before being able to partially transcend them. The author presents different research trends that have evolved from mainstream critical “glocal” (global/local) trends to the more polarized ones of postcolonial and Islamic perspectives. When analyzing the latter, the author also highlights differences between the trends that existed or evolved previous to and immediately following the 2011 Arab uprisings—cognitively inspired movements that were induced by paradigm shifts in the Arab social sciences.

This chapter offers a decolonial historical sociology of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), one focused on the historical as well as contemporary colonialities of power as a core discourse of governance across the region. After critiquing research grounded on subaltern and postcolonial studies for failing to capture the colonial dynamics operating in post-independence political systems across the MENA, the author explores how Timothy Mitchell’s seminal analysis of the state as an discursive effect of power relations, as well as the present-day relevance of the idea of ahl al-hall wa-l-‘aqd (“those who have binding authority”) in traditional Islamic jurisprudence, can together promote a more perceptive and illuminating discussion of the dynamics of political power across the region.

In sharp contrast to the sense of a “migrant crisis” which prevails in Europe, nation states in the Horn of Africa understand migration, including state-induced population displacement, as unexceptional. The chapter addresses this apparent paradox by contrasting European policy discourse on migration with the long-term political and structural processes in northeastern Africa that cause population displacement and migration. The chapter then examines the migration policies of governments in the Horn and concludes by arguing that the European Union misrepresents and misunderstands the factors responsible for large-scale migration and the role of states in exploiting migrants. For these reasons it is highly unlikely that the EU-Horn of Africa Action Plan/Khartoum process will bring about better border management policies and practices.

This chapter examines the criminalization of asylum seekers arriving irregularly into Canada and the human rights implications of this process, in particular the Designated Foreign National (DFN) policy established in 2012 and the increased role of the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) in the refugee system. These changes exemplify the crisis-led management by the previous Conservative government as a reaction to the 2009 and 2010 boat arrivals of nearly 600 Tamil asylum seekers from Sri Lanka. The specific objectives of the policy amendments are scrutinized to determine whether their stated goals are being achieved. The chapter draws on interviews conducted between October 2015 and May 2017 in three major provinces (Quebec, Ontario, and British Columbia) that host the majority of asylum seekers in Canada.