The Global Sociology Blog

It is my great privilege to have some of my blog posts featured over at the Dutch progressive community blog, Sargasso. Lots of great content, so, update your bookmark and brush up on your Dutch!

Sargasso via kwout

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I have to say that based on the title, I had high expectations for Andrei Markovits and Lars Rensmann’s Gaming The World: How Sports are Reshaping Global Politics and Culture. Sadly, I was disappointed. Not that the book is all bad, no. It is interesting at times, but a bit tedious at others. But my [...]

I must confess that I was a bit worried when I started Cory Doctorow’s For The Win. In my previous reviews of Doctorow’s books, I noted a pattern and I was worried I might find it again in this book. Fortunately, this was not the case.
The subtitle of the book is “Online or offline, you’ve [...]

Scary and unsustainable… who came up with something like this. Don’t tell me it’s an effective and efficient way of organizing a system:

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This is nice follow-up on my previous post of delinquency statistics, this time, on global poverty statistics, via Social Watch:

“When the United Nations hosts a summit meeting of world leaders next September to assess the current state of its Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), it is expected to single out one of the major [...]

So, I am working my way through this great March – June 2010 of Globalizations, special issue on globalization and crisis and there are two articles, one by François Houtart and the other by Susan George that get me annoyed. Both of them are, I think, correct in their diagnosis. For instance, for Houtart, a [...]

Ankie Hoogvelt (2010), Globalisation, Crisis and the Political Economy of the International Monetary (Dis)Order, Globalizations, March – June 2010, Nos. 1-2, pp.51-66.
In this article, Hoogvelt argues that the deep cause of the financial crisis of 2008 has to do with globalized financialization spurred by technological innovation that made possible instantaneous trade and financial transactions. Similarly, [...]

Via Roger Ebert, this amazing series of photos. The quantitative and qualitative differences are obvious as well as the contrast between staple foods, grown and cooked versus processed and packaged.

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From the New York Times (via Mireya Marquez):

This graph accompanies a full article on the globalization of migration:
“The United Nations estimates that there are 214 million migrants across the globe, an increase of about 37 percent in two decades. Their ranks grew by 41 percent in Europe and 80 percent in North [...]

Saskia Sassen (2010), “A Savage Sorting of Winners and Losers: Contemporary Versions of Primitive Accumulation,” Globalizations, March-June 2010, Nos. 1-2, pp. 23-50.

“Here I explore the possibility that capitalism today is undergoing the systemic equivalent to Marx’s notion of primitive accumulation (PA), only now as deepening advanced capitalism predicated on the destruction of more traditional forms [...]

In this great post, Tony Karon channels David Held’s analysis of globalization as multipolar phenomenon. Karon starts by enunciating what makes this World Cup actually quite interesting:

“Les Bleus were trounced by Uruguay and South Africa, and plunged into a national crisis that required presidential intervention by their own implosion. Uruguay, refusing to accept [...]

So there was this relatively uninteresting tiff between Terry Eagleton (football is the crack cocaine of the masses!) and Dave Zirin (but football is fun… which is, by the way, why it works as presumably crack cocaine of the masses, if it weren’t fun, no one would care).
Anyhoo, I have just finished reading Gabriel Ondetti’s [...]

Shame on me for not having had the time to read Raj Patel’s The Value of Nothing. I must say, the man is as funny as he informative.
Here are a couple of videos anyway (below the fold because they auto-start and it’s annoying):

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A few days ago, I made a point I have made before: that local governance is not inherently more democratic than of other levels (national, regional or global). This point was discussed over at Corrente where some were unconvinced and Lambert noted that, in the context of inaccessible national politics, there is a greater chance [...]

Wendy Wolford and Angus Lindsay Wright’s To Inherit The Earth: The Landless Movement and the Struggle for a New Brazil is the perfect introduction to the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST).
The book is roughly divided into four main sections. The first goes through a general political history of Brazil along with its Portuguese [...]