INTL 487 - Senior Seminar: Globalization and its Discontents

Globalization has helped the international community to come together with an unprecedented immediacy. It has also enabled individuals and on-state actors to assume powers and duties formerly exclusive to state. The dispersion of state prerogatives can be liberating, as when oppressed people use new communication technologies to overthrow their masters. It can also provide opportunities for criminal enterprises and other agents of disorder to act with impunity. Our senior seminar will explore the tensions between the centripedal forces that bring us together, and the centrifugal forces that tear the global community apart. The state will most often be the law. The Westphalian sovereign state has often been declared vanquished by globalization, yet it is still very much alive, and has proven creative in deriving new means to control its subjects. It must do so because those subjects have proven equally creative in resisting state control; and globalization, in both its modern and older forms, has provided those subjects with many tools of resistance. Prerequisite(s): Senior standing or permission of instructor. Every year. (4 Credits)