Volume 14, Issue 1 -

There has been a firestorm of moral outrage regarding the collection and misuse of personal information by data-informed digital companies. In framing their actions we often make a distinction between “good” and “bad” actors. I investigate the hidden presupposition that informs this dichotomy, by using the figure of the citizen to reveal an underlying structural transformation in the fog of our times. I ask, what can we reverse engineer from this historical phenomenon to derive a meaning of the political project defining the making of “digital space,” which shares meaning with the supposed inherent characteristics of the age, and its relationship to the production, validation, and dissemination of information? I’ll present a case for how an atomization of affinity and failure maps and draws energy from a broader historical agenda of social, political, and economic deregulation. On this basis I ask, what are the implications for understanding the figure of the digital citizen?

Since the Cold War, the Global South has become the basis of China’s political, economic, and military interests, as well as the major theater of China’s power competition with the United States. It is thus necessary to recognize how developing states have responded to changes in the international system brought on by China’s rise. Given the tide of nativism opposing trade and globalization, mostly studied through a Western lens, this study extends the analysis to the attitudes of the Global South. I outline the Western reaction to China’s rise to differentiate the factors that provoke backlash in the developed and developing world. Analyzing the relationship between China’s economic engagement and the degree of anti-China sentiment in a given region, as compared to the same relationships for the United States, I provide an amendment to Friedman’s “Golden Straitjacket” thesis to better understand China’s role in the processes of globalization and discuss the implications of the relationship between trade and domestic attitudes on the liberal theory of trade interdependence and conflict. I argue that since China’s “Jade Straitjacket” is a destabilizing force that provokes negative backlash stronger than reactions to American trade based on the findings of this study, policymakers must contend with the disconnect between elites who make the decision to don the straitjacket and domestic audiences who react adversely to the societal ramifications of these decisions.

With the global political tide pushing increasingly narrow state-framed worldviews there is a retrenchment of how people understand their relational place in, and connection to, the world. This essay argues that precisely because of the rise of hyper-nationalism (and accompanying anti-democratic trends) there is an urgent need to pursue the globalizing of public education and the coproduction of global knowledge more generally. I suggest that the emerging field of Global Studies, which has been gaining ground in the United States and even more so around the world in recent decades, offers a pedagogical pathway to promoting critical interdisciplinary perspectives and fostering equality and respect for others. My basic claim is that Global Studies shares with liberal education a core mission to promote peace in a world of cultural diversity. But in calling for epistemological pluralism – and highlighting the American (western) epistemological underpinnings of the liberal arts that are deeply implicated in colonial histories of racism, oppression and silencing of non-western knowledge – Global Studies also highlights the inherent limitations of liberal education that as a new field of inquiry it seeks to overcome.

The essay presents the dynamics of what we call “new globalization,” a second stage of the emergence of a new regime, which, as a result of capital’s need to continuously find new frontiers of accumulation, is extending to countries previously considered as residual peripheries. It analyzes cultural diplomacy and university education as two tools used to manage power and reproduce class divisions now designed by an economic meritocratic system of global intellectual creative elites locally circumscribed and globally connected.

A growing number of scholars assert that the second half of the century will be the African century. But the question is how exactly, and with which perspectives. This is the challenge of the African youth. Africa’s young are eagerly searching for their place in globalization. The global environmental challenge provides the best opportunity for the continent’s new generation for two reasons: because Africa will be most affected by climate change, and because it is ideally suited to be at the forefront of the emerging renewable energy business, including solar and wind energy. Moreover, taking care of the environment could be a decisive carrier of inter-generational understanding and ethnic reconciliation. In an international knowledge economy, Africa’s youth needs first and foremost an educational initiative at the forefront of global knowledge combining activism with research and policy in order to fulfill such ambition.