Globalization in Question: Hierarchies, States and Gender. NCRE Online Paper No. 01/03

[From the Introduction] Globalization is the pervasive buzzword of the day as we enter the new millennium. From the BBC's Reith lecturers to first-year undergraduates at Bradford University, almost everybody on the ground has a pretty shrewd idea of what globalization means - the rise of the global society, economy and polity. Nevertheless, the perception is widespread that the term 'globalization' is persistent, over-used and under-defined (Devetak and Higgott l999). The first section below investigates further what globalization means or is - and whether it can really be demonstrated to exist. Globalization, whether conceived primarily in terms of markets or in its political or other ramifications, leads us to view the world 'in the round' (Keens-Soper 2000, 54). The Courier (l997) also emphasized the importance of the geographical dimension of globalization in French and other Latinbased languages. But this article argues that the spherical shape of globalization is misleading; globalization is more like a pyramid with powerful elite states, corporations and persons (the latter mostly male) at the top and the more powerless, peripheral and disproportionately female entities at the bottom