globalization

Ethical labeling campaigns have become a central means for diffusing and negotiating conflicts between social movements and market actors. Fair Trade was a pioneering ethical label and, by many accounts, a success. For nearly a decade, United Students for Fair Trade (USFT) activists worked to build the reputation of the Fair Trade Certified (FTC) label, but in Fall 2011 they withdrew their support and urged ethical consumers to do the same. This paper is an urgent reflection on USFT's trajectory from guerrilla marketing to boycotting FTC products.

In the early 2000s the coffee crisis emerged as a central object of study for commodity chain scholars. In this paper I revisit the scene of the coffee crisis in Nicaragua to understand violent processes of devaluation and disinvestment that devastated the countryside for more than five years (2000–05). Employing a commodity disarticulations approach, I argue that conventional explanations of the coffee crisis as one of overproduction and devaluation generally failed to unravel the layered spatiality of dispossession that enables coffee chain formations.

The concept of economic localization, although receiving increasing academic and practical interest, still lacks a solid theoretical background. Our aim here is to suggest a working definition of the term economic localization and to outline its possible interpretations and operationalizations.

If the rise of the World Social Forum is any indication, there is a groundswell of support for alternatives to capitalism. But within this movement that links North and South, ‘developed’ and less ‘developed’ nations worldwide, the debate as to what constitutes an economic alternative is fraught with judgments about the purity or contamination of what is on offer.

"Recently I attended a conference on globalization and global regulation which was organized by some left social scientists at a university in the USA. One thing I noticed in many of the contributions was the way in which everything was centered on or by capitalism, almost by default. Regulation was seen as focused upon capitalism and ultimately became part of a capitalist formation. Non-capitalist social sites (including the household and the state) were involved in the reproduction of capitalism, perhaps in new forms.

Women and the Politics of Place (WPP) is a project of narrating and theorizing a globally emergent form of localized politics — one that is largely of if not necessarily for women — with the goal of bringing this politics into a new stage of being. What is truly distinctive about WPP is the vision of a place-based yet at the same time global movement (Osterweil 2004).

Over the past several decades a revolutionary “politics of place” has emerged around the world, linked through globally accessible media, loosely coordinated federations, and international gatherings, most notably the World Social Forum. While traditional revolutionary politics confronts a single space of dominion, the politics of place imagines and creates multiple spaces of freedom and self-determination. It is a politics of the here and now, embedded in place yet globally transformative.