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Given that sharing a democratic regime or culture increases the likelihood of bilateral trade flows between country dyads, this article investigates whether individuals are more likely to support preferential trade liberalization with other democracies and countries they perceive as culturally similar to the home country. Adopting experimental manipulation of the regime type and the cultural identity of the partner country on nationally representative survey data from two emerging market countries, Turkey and Greece, I demonstrate that while cultural affiliation does not condition individual attitudes, respondents in both samples display a highly significant preference for trade liberalization with a democratic country over an authoritarian one. Assessments based on respondents’ endorsement of postmaterialist values, international trade attitudes, and interpersonal trust reveal that while the democracy preference of Turkish respondents are likely affected by functional reasons, both functional and normative dynamics condition Greek attitudes. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1057/s41304-020-00290-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This chapter first provides an estimation of the global sports industry’s economic significance. Despite the paucity of data, a quantitative picture is exhibited as regards international trade in sporting goods, the economic significance of sport in different developed countries, employment in the sports industry, and even an economic estimation of the global dark side of sport (manipulations, corruption, match-fixing, doping). Then the globalization of different sport markets is covered: markets for sport participation, for sporting events, for sport TV viewing, for sport sponsorship, for online sport betting, and for sports goods, with associated firms’ strategies. On the top of this, big professional soccer clubs are analyzed as multinational companies owing to their international player transfers, their internationalized capital ownership and their revenues flowing from global financial sources. A last point briefly lists and describes the major facets of the dark side of sport spreading worldwide.

Economics has sustainable political impact, shapes beliefs, institutions and policies and co-creates global economic reality. Therefore, citizens should be aware of economics’ ways of thinking and its impact on national and international institutions and policies. The chapter presents plural perspectives to economic globalisation. It outlines rather mixed empirical evidence. Against widespread belief, national governments are still key players of economic globalisation enjoying considerable leeway in dealing with domestic impact of globalisation. From this perspective, global citizenship education can be conceptualised as “normal” citizenship education applied to the field of global political issues.

This chapter outlines the various ways in which the Malaysian state has dealt with irregular migrant flows since the 1970s. It then explains the domestic and external interests that have influenced the states’ approach to different migrant groups. This chapter puts forward the argument that understanding Malaysian state behaviour towards irregular migrants is related to a complex range of intersecting factors. These include religious affinity, ethnicity, labour market needs, federal-state relations, bilateral relations with its neighbours and neo-liberal economic globalisation.

The starting point of this book was the observation of a growing complexity of actors and their interrelationships in the international arena—a development that has been driven by the pressures of globalisation. Following more than three decades of continuing discourse of globalisation as guarantor of economic growth, the dominant narrative of neo-liberalism and a belief in increasing the efficacy of government through adopting private sector-style, marketised rationales, a growing number of sub-national authorities have begun to venture into new policy fields and arenas to chase presumed opportunities. The larger cities have responded to this pressure to become more entrepreneurial and innovative in their policies. Their scope and capacity to do so varies, owing to different positions of strength: the successful metropolises, especially the so-called global cities, are in a much stronger position to become international actors than smaller, peripheral towns or struggling post-industrial cities. In addition, available instruments and established political cultures and milieux also matter. What all sub-national actors share is the growing willingness—out of conviction in the case of the desire to engage with international work on climate change or sheer economic necessity—to go beyond national borders and familiar political-economic conditions and relationships, and step into the international arena. While this action is the logical consequence of the past decades of ideological discourse and political strategies, it seems that academic debate and, especially disciplinary comfort zones, have been largely unresponsive to these developments, remaining wedded to their established respective focus on, and approaches to, cities (and regions) on the one hand, and the international realm surrounding ‘black boxes’ of nation states, on the other. The growing dynamics that have brought these two phenomena—cities and internationality—increasingly closer together, to the point of challenging nation states in their presumed sovereignty in the international arena, have not really been captured analytically and fallen into a ‘conceptual gap’. Chapter 1 discussed this ‘gap’ between the inherent topical and conceptual boundaries of the two relevant disciplines, Urban Studies and International Relations. Neither has ventured much beyond their self-defined conceptual horizons, and thus they have been unable to draw on each other’s expertise and insights to gain a better understanding of, and explanation for, the unfolding process of the growing ‘urbanisation’ of global governance. It is a process, as pointed out in Chap. 1, that demonstrates some aspects of the concept of glocalisation, although that was proposed by Swyngedow (2002) from a perspective of economic globalisation. This argued for the fusion of the local and the global scales in analysing economic globalism, so as to capture the growing role of localness in economic decisions and strategies. At first sight, this seems an inherent contradiction to the notion of an unbounded, in effect unified, global space. This realisation of a clear role for the sub-national, especially cities, needs to find a corresponding response in the analysis of global governance. Yet, while Global Political Economy does recognise the multi-scalar organisation and interaction of the global economy, IR, as the political-institutional ‘sister’ discipline, has largely stayed away from such a trans-scalar approach, and has, instead, continued to define the ‘international’ first and foremost as a sum of nation states and their sovereign action, with all other interests subordinate to that. Certainly, this largely applies to the sub-national actors, as conceptualised some twenty years ago by Agnew (1995) as the ‘territorial trap’ in IR. Yet, this container thinking, as Chap. 2 demonstrates, has shown few signs of abating, as ‘realist’ approaches continue to dominate IR in its conceptualisation of the ‘international’ and its governance (Baylis et al. 2013; Nye 2004).

There is a widely held view that the nation-state has become less central to media and communications policy over the last two decades. As Jan van Cuilenberg and Denis McQuail (2003, p. 181) observed in their overview of trends in communications policy-making, ‘the old normative media policies have been challenged and policy-makers are searching for a new communications policy paradigm’. There are characteristically five factors put forward as to why the nation-state has become less central to media in the twenty-first century: 1. Economic globalisation has seen an overall decline in the power and capacities of nation-states, as power has shifted both to the global level and — to a lesser degree — to the local level; 2. Political ideologies of neo-liberalism have been deliberately used to weaken the powers of nation-states vis-a-vis global media corporations; 3. The globally networked nature of the Internet makes regulation through national laws and policies less feasible; 4. Globally networked media have enhanced consumer choice, and the assumptions of media scarcity that previously legitimated media policies are no longer valid; 5. The locus of regulatory influence has shifted from nation-state agencies to non-state actors, ranging from digital media corporations themselves to non-government organisations and various advocacy groups.

Focusing on theories of society, this chapter offers material for an interdisciplinary social-ecological theory of nature and society. The development of the sociological discourse and the limits of sociological reflections on nature and the environment are described. The themes discussed include theory-guided analyses of modes of production and reproduction of economy and society, economic globalisation, global resource flows, coupling of social and ecological systems, and environmental governance and regulation. It is concluded that the emerging interdisciplinary theory needs to develop methodologies for two purposes: to combine sociological and ecological knowledge about global change, and to develop bridging concepts to connect sociological and ecological theories.

Managers today have to deal with people from around the world, directly, in negotiations with suppliers of products and services from diverse regions or, indirectly, through contact with individuals who impact the costs of production. Although businesses and economic activity have been facilitators and drivers of increasing economic globalization, corporations increasingly find themselves in a reversed role, that is as victims of forces they have previously helped to strengthen and as patients of structural illnesses they helped to spread. The social and ecological externalities of business, long since ignored in boardrooms in pursuit of an increased bottom line, have now started to become visible on the balance sheets – as costs of unsustainable management models.

The concepts of double exposure and multiple stresses have become increasingly important in research that focuses on the vulnerability of livelihoods. The double impact of climate change and economic globalization on rural livelihood provides a valuable framework for understanding the vulnerability of rural households in northeastern St Vincent. This study, which forms part of a wider dissertation, utilized a mixed-methods approach, which consisted of 311 questionnaires, 70 semi-structured interviews with farmers, elite interviews, and focus group discussions. The study explains the vulnerability of rural households, recognizing that livelihood vulnerability is a key driver of poverty within the communities. It assesses the vulnerability of rural livelihoods to environmental change and globalization, while recognizing that there are other stresses faced by these households. This multiple exposure creates a form of powerlessness amongst households and functions to keep them in a vicious cycle of vulnerability.

It is difficult to elaborate on the development of social policies without alluding to the vital role played by the International Labour Organization (ILO) in developing the idea of a social protection floor (Deacon 2013). The ILO has also been at the forefront in articulating a sharper role for regional organizations in the area of social policies. Its commitment to highlighting the need for regional integration to be anchored around social policies as tools with which to attenuate the negative effects of economic globalization burgeoned especially from 2004. In the course of that year, the ILO issued a commissioned report that considered the various ways in which regional integration could be used to cushion citizens against the debilitating impacts of economic globalization. It made clear that it was useful ‘to build on efforts by regional groupings to promote social cohesion and solidarity among their members’ (World Commission on the Social Dimension of Globalization (WCSDG) 2004, p. 7). The document explored some of the merits and benefits of regional social policies including better resilience to outside economic pressures, stronger political weight notably for smaller countries, enhanced regional capacities and better links to the global economy (WCSDG 2004, p. 71).

During the life of the climate regime structural change in the international political system has reflected underlying shifts in the pattern and distribution of economic growth and associated emissions of GHGs. The period 1989–91 has pivotal significance. The ending of the Cold War re-ordered the international political structure and accelerated the processes of economic globalisation, as previously closed economies became enmeshed in a worldwide, market-based system of finance and production. This, in turn, had profound implications for the power structure. In 1992 the United States was the sole remaining superpower, in what was then described as its ‘unipolar’ moment. In economic scale it was matched only by the EU. In the trade regime and elsewhere it was still possible to portray economic diplomacy in terms of a directorate of two, or perhaps four, advanced industrialised powers. Within a decade, however, China had been admitted to the WTO and, profiting from the decision of many developed world firms to re-locate their production processes to take advantage of its low wage rates, achieved spectacular rates of economic growth, averaging over 9 per cent per annum. Other ‘emergent economies’ also exhibited high growth rates, leading to perceptions of a new multipolar structure, or even a potential con-dominion of the United States and China (the G2). The events of the 2009 Copenhagen COP were an emblematic demonstration of reordered power relationships.

International migration in its link to development has been subject to policy and academic analysis for decades. The current phase however distinguishes itself from previous phases in that it comes at a particular historical moment in time, at the tail end of economic globalisation that has resulted in an onslaught on labour rights and the weakening of labour movements worldwide. The lack of attention paid to ‘labour governance’ in global migration governance fora and policy descriptions has resulted in a utilitarian approach to the governance of worker mobility. The nascent global migrant rights movement has been mobilised to resist the instrumentalisation of migration as a tool for development premised on temporary migration schemes that curtail crucial rights for migrants. Their key demands pertain to greater freedom of mobility in a context of decent work opportunities ‘here’ and ‘there’.

Economic globalization is the inevitable outgrowth of the socialization of production. This process has gone through three big stages since the Age of Discovery in the late 15th century. The first stage was the era of mercantile capitalism preceding the Industrial Revolution. The second phase of globalization occurred during the Industrial Revolution, when a vertical worldwide division of labor took form. In the third phase of globalization, which is unfolding in the present-day world economy, the earlier vertical international division of labor has given way to a horizontal division of labor. One salient feature of this third stage is the globalization of capital. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is one of the main forms of this phenomenon.

This chapter attempts to explain how the profound changes of the international political economy since the 1970s have triggered a fundamental transformation of the welfare state as a core dimension of the modern state. This is by no means a new research question. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the impact of economic globalization on advanced welfare states was the dominant topic in macro-quantitative research. Interestingly, however, despite a large amount of research, no consensus has been achieved about whether and how economic globalization has affected national welfare states. Evidence has been presented to support virtually any theoretically plausible explanation about the globalization-welfare state nexus. Consider the following quotes: The only evidence of a significant globalization effect to emerge anywhere in the analysis is an apparent relationship between the growth of foreign direct investment and cutbacks in existing programme spending. However, this is an effect that proves not to be statistically robust. Thus the crisis threat of globalization [...] is revealed as a ‘paper tiger’. (Castles 2004, 17)

During the past 20 years, European football has witnessed an intense change process that has radically transformed some of its main structural characteristics. This process is related to the same tendencies that have affected other aspects of social and economic life in western societies, such as the communication technologies revolution, the progressive rationalization of work, the increase in migration, the commodification of human activity, and the development of social and economic globalization processes, to name a few of the most relevant changes. These trends are usually thought to have had a strong influence on the recent evolution of football, giving rise to a redefinition of its competitive structures (Giulianotti, 1999), the clubs’ transformation into business organizations (Walsh and Giulianotti, 2001; Moor, 2007), the formation of a global market of hyper-professionalized footballers (Lanfranchi and Taylor, 2001), and the general commercialization of the ethos that articulated the modern formation of this sport around values of fun, sport sociability and fair play (Sewart, 1987; Andrews, 2004).

Economic globalization has not so much diminished the autonomy of the state, including over immigration, as enhanced its competence and legal tools. It was recognized at the outset that despite well-documented welfare gains, states show an aversion to open-door migration policies, insisting on their national prerogatives to control and restrict migration flows. This contemporary trend recalls the contradictory process identified by Sassen: the construction of border-free economic areas versus the increasing border controls against irregular migrants (free circulation of capital versus free movement of persons) (Sassen, 1996). Migration is being ‘lamented as the “missing global flow”’ (Ranis, 2007, p. 285), even though welfare gains from migration have been estimated to outnumber those from trade liberalization in goods and services. Compared to ‘the other dimensions of globalization’ (World Bank, 2006, p. 31), in particular, trade in goods and services, the system does not seem ready to put the liberalization of the cross-border movement of persons on to the global agenda but is more oriented towards a ‘nearly complete globalization of everything but labour’ (Freeman, 2006, p. 145; Pritchett, 2006, p. 12; Nonnenmacher, 2012).

Museums and galleries do not exist independently of the societies that they are a part of. Equally, they do not exist independently of the wider patterns of thought, argument, expectation and belief that are to be found at the international level of organisation and action (Sylvester, 2009, 3–6). These international factors have an important part to play in the establishment of legitimations for the variety of museum practices and customs in different countries and regions of the world, as well as in providing justifications and rationalisations for the entire museum enterprise: Duncan (1995, 16), for example, argues that ‘through most of the nineteenth century, an international museum culture remained firmly committed to the idea that the first responsibility of a public art museum is to enlighten and improve its visitors morally, socially and politically’, thus providing a purpose and focus for museums that was rooted in an accepted set of ideas that were commonly shared. In practice, the world of museums today is neither simply the product of some basic human need to collect and exhibit material that is meaningful to groups and societies, nor simply the result of some evolutionary development that can be explained as leading, in the traditionally Whiggish fashion, to a continually better set of collections, patterns of display, conservation techniques, exhibition and labelling.

Many scholars have argued that the expansion of global manufacturing is enhancing social justice through providing employment opportunities for women; on the other hand, others have claimed that economic globalization is less likely to expand freedom and labor justice since global manufacturing enterprises are mostly characterized by violations of labor rights. This chapter will address this debate and substantiate with empirical evidence from Bangladesh readymade garments (RMG) industries. We will first highlight how Third World industrialization became rooted in new forms of global production systems such as the “World Factory” and the export processing zones (EPZs), giving rise to a gendered division of labor, and then engage in scholarly debate on flexible accumulation and patterned outcomes.

Over the past couple of decades, the local and regional scales of politicaleconomic organisation have gained a renewed prominence set against a backdrop of economic globalisation and state restructuring (Storper, 1997). Variously characterised as a ‘new regionalism’ or ‘new localism’ (Lovering, 1999), prevailing approaches to sub-national economic development regard the institutional capacity to foster bottom-up forms of growth based upon the harnessing of local skills and resources as a crucial source of competitiveness in an increasingly globalised economy (Bristow, 2010). Devolution has been identified as a key ‘global trend’, as a range of governments across the world have transferred power to regional institutions as a means of promoting political decentralisation and recognising distinct territorial identities, in addition to the promotion of economic development (Rodriguez-Pose and Sandall, 2008).

This chapter deals with the potential congruence between the processes of European integration and those of regionalisation. This is not really a new question: from the end of the 1980s European public policy, particularly cohesion policy, has been identified as a key factor in the reconfiguration of territories and public policy in western Europe. European integration is analysed as a political opportunity structure and as a process for creating new resources likely to strengthen the position of regional actors in their confrontations with the political and administrative apparatus of the long-established nation-states. However, analyses of the types of changes occurring have evolved: in the 1990s, for example, a striking number of scholars concluded that the European variable played a key role in the construction of multi-level governance (Marks 1996) and/or in the emergence of a neo-regionalism in western Europe (Keating 1998). More recently, work has been published focusing on the impact of Europeanisation on domestic political systems (Brzel 2002; Bourne 2003; Gualini 2004) which describe a more complex reality in which changes of scale, when they happen, are more to be found in regional society, in the transformation of relations between the centre and the periphery, or in the dynamics of economic globalisation than in a European ‘big bang’ (Bukowski et al. 2003; Pasquier 2004).

International migration and substate nationalism present distinct, but significant challenges to the modern nation-state. Advances in communications, economic flows, and changing political institutions have made it progressively easier for individuals to migrate yet still maintain ties to their home country (Castles 2008). Movement of people has never been as free as flows of capital and goods (Zolberg 1999). Nonetheless, economic globalization pressures nation-states in relation to both emigration and immigration, as companies may seek to import or move labour supply and labour-exporting countries push to include labour movement clauses into bilateral and multilateral trade agreements (Chaudhuri et al. 2004; Strutt et al. 2008).

Economic globalization and the emergence of major regional economic blocs place Africa in a challenging situation. As the physical borders of nation states become less relevant, the formation of regional entities is an essential way to respond to the legitimate aspirations of people. Aware that development requires pooling resources for effective industrialization and expanded markets, West African countries have previously engaged in integration through the West African Economic Community (WAEC) and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS). By creating in 1994 the West African Economic and Monetary Union (WAEMU), member states have again shown interest in coming together to better integrate into the global economy. The WAEMU provides for a multilateral surveillance mechanism aimed at ensuring the “convergence” of member economies. Convergence, the gradual reduction of disparities in economic indicators between countries, can generally be achieved through two distinct but not exclusive patterns: nominal convergence, which focuses on the evolution of nominal variables (costs and prices); and real convergence, which requires the approximation of living standards. Like the European Union, WAEMU countries have opted for the convergence of nominal variables, assuming that nominal convergence will lead to real convergence.

Despite significant urbanization, democratization, and economic globalization over the last few decades, Africans still have few direct interactions with national government officials. The president and the politicians in the capital remain far removed, making the relationship between rulers and ruled largely an indirect one. Elections, whether competitive or merely ritualistic, do little to reduce this distance between citizens and government, leaving room for misinterpretation of the people’s preferences or leading to abuse of authority that citizens entrust in the government. ‘A food should not be cooked in Uror and prepared by somebody coming from Juba,’ explains a Nuer villager in South Sudan, Africa’s newest country. ‘These small levels are the eyes; they see and solve the problems out there’ (Cook et al. 2013, 29). Her views are echoed in surveys across 20 countries, where Africans describe local officials as more responsive than national ones by an average margin of 11 points, sometimes by substantially more (Bratton 2010a). At the same time, waves of institutional reforms are multiplying the opportunities for interactions with subnational tiers of government. Tanzania now has nearly 285,000 elected offices and Burkina Faso has some 17,000; in Ethiopia 3.6 million people — an estimated ten percent of all adults — run for office across its five levels of government (Dickovick and Riedl 2010).

Globalization is a term that came into fashion around 1990. It generally refers to the processes that lead to the increased density, speed and reach of transnational connections, associated with the global spread of capitalism and new information and communication technologies. Globalization can be studied in its economic, political, ecological or cultural aspects, and there is a rich scholarly literature, much of it interdisciplinary, dealing with the subject (see Eriksen, 2013; Ritzer, 2011 for overviews). Moreover, globalization can be studied as a macro-phenomenon, with a focus on the global economy, transnational companies, and so on, or as a micro-phenomenon, by focusing instead on relationships between people and small groups. It is not going away. The financial crisis of 2008 led some commentators and analysts to conclude that globalization had suffered a severe setback (see Rodrik, 2011). While this was doubtless true, at least temporarily, of global financial capitalism, other processes of economic globalization continued unimpeded in realms such as communication and migration, commodity trading and climate change prevention, although the growth rate has slowed in many parts of the world following the financial meltdown and subsequent uncertainty surrounding the euro, the fiscal deficit in the United States, and political volatility around the Mediterranean.

In this era of economic globalization, there has been remarkable growth in the volume and value of global trade, investment, and finance. These international economic relationships have important implications for the natural environment, as all have been identified as having some linkage to environmental quality. The extent to which these international economic relationships contribute to environmental problems or to solutions for environmental problems is the subject of extensive debate (see, for example, Boyce, 2008; Gallagher, 2009; Clapp and Dauvergne, 2011; Newell, 2012; Clapp and Helleiner, 2012). Some see the relationship as largely positive, with environmental benefits being attached to the economic growth that global economic transactions seek to facilitate. For these thinkers, environmental policies should be able to address any negative outcomes that may arise in ways that do not impede global economic activity. Others, however, see mainly negative environmental implications arising from global economic relationships and the economic growth that is associated with it. For them, it is important that environmental policies do restrict global economic transactions. A third view which seeks to bridge the divide is also gaining prominence, arguing that while there are some potential negative aspects of global economic relations for the environment, a balanced management of the global economy can bring both economic and environmental benefits.

The history of Turkish modernity is a history of transformation along four dimensions: modernization, democratization, globalization, and Europeanization. The process of globalization starting in the 1980s has played a particularly important role in challenging the state-centric modernization established in 1923 by the republican elite. Accordingly, in the 1980s and 1990s Turkish modernity faced serious challenges with the emergence of new bourgeois classes in the periphery, the rise of the Kurdish movement, as well as the increasing prominence of Islamic politics. These developments threatened the most fundamental principles of Turkish modernity, namely, state-centric modernization, organic unity of the nation, and secularism. Such changes along with increasing risks of economic globalization forced political actors to adapt to the changing political and social dynamics in Turkey which ended in a severe political impasse and serious economic crises in the 1990s and early 2000s. The inability of the political actors in the 1990s to formulate effective responses to the increasing complexity of Turkish modernity in the age of globalization led to the emergence of a new actor in Turkish politics, the AKP, which came to power in 2002. As such, the AKP can be seen as a product of multiplex transformation in the Turkish society. Soon after its establishment, the party secured a strong majority government, which successfully governed the processes of globalization, democratization, Europeanization, and modernization.

Much of the global economy is now organized in global value chains that span continents and connect producers and buyers across countries. This complex and dynamic structure of economic activity has rapidly spurred the productive capacity of developing and emerging economies. Economic globalization has created a great deal of wealth for some people in some regions of the world, but rapid economic growth has also been accompanied by the expansion of precarious forms of work, particularly at the margins of the new global economy, but also within core functions and companies. It has also led to pressure on labour in more traditional centres of production.

As we have already demonstrated in the previous chapters globalization has played an important role in shaping the course of Turkey’s transformation in recent decades. Specifically, we have discussed how economic globalization starting in the 1980s affected Turkish society and politics by enlarging and empowering particular socioeconomic groups. We have also analyzed the ways in which the AKP pursued economic globalization after it came to power in 2002 and eventually benefitted from successful neoliberal expansion in consolidating its electoral hegemony. We now turn to the impact of globalization on Turkish foreign policy, which under the AKP takes a new form and involves active globalization through proactive and multidimensional foreign policy and constitutes an integral part of Turkey’s transformation under the AKP. This growing proactivism should be seen as complementary to other elements of AKP’s transformation project, which generates substantial interdependency among domestic, regional, and international politics by integrating security, economy, and democracy.1

In 2001, several international unions and union bodies1 met to discuss a wide-ranging review of international unionism (Schmidt, 2005). One upshot of this review was that the international unions began to rebadge themselves as global unions. There were several reasons for this organisational name change. First, it reflected efforts to address the social consequences of neo-liberal policies of economic globalisation and the International Labour Organisation (ILO)-led campaign for decent work for all workers everywhere. Second, it reflected the way global unions seek alliances with other transnational movements against neo-liberal globalisation. Third, after the end of the Cold War, the collapse of apartheid, and union involvement in several democratisation movements, the new name reflects the unions’ attempt to move beyond old tensions between revolution and reformism, or communist, social democratic, and liberal forms of internationalism.

Development discourse often emphasizes the poverty reduction potential of international migration as a positive element of globalization in general and economic globalization in particular (Das 2009). The strongest evidence in support of this argument is the rapid/continuous increase in the flow of economic remittances bound to sending countries in the global south (De Haas 2005; World Bank 2005, 2011). Perhaps an even more appealing pro-poor property of these remittances is their resilience during global financial crises (see Sirkeci et al. 2012 for evidence during the 2008 crisis). The impact of migration, including that of the remittances, is felt the soonest and the strongest by the immediate members of transnational families left behind by the migrants. This impact, as all other globalization-related impacts, can either be a benign force (Dollar and Kraay 2002) or a malign one (Milanovic 2003). Migration and globalization are closely connected, yet the migration of people is often ignored in the literature on globalization. Children are also often excluded from our conceptualization of the world and research on globalization. This chapter, using data from Sri Lanka, looks at micro-level impacts of the international migration of parents on their children with a view to contributing to this debate from the angle of children. It offers an innovative contribution to the emerging literature on migration and globalization through an exploration of children’s and families’ engagement in migration that draws attention to multidirectional and multitemporal movements within individual, family and community migratory ‘arcs’.

Globalisation generates a paradox of power by simultaneously strengthening and weakening the State (Phillips, 1998). As Evans (1992) further highlights, economic globalisation restricts State power, but transnational capital needs capable States as much, or even more than, as domestically oriented business does.

Rapid changes in technology have facilitated changes in production processes and structures, thereby accelerating cross-border movement of capital, labour, goods and services. This has led to increasing economic integration between most countries. These cross-border flows of goods, services, and factors of production — understood as the process of economic globalization — have contributed to the economic development of some countries. But, speculative financial flows have caused disruptions in the economic growth and stability of some countries as in the Asian Financial Crisis (AFC) of 1997–1998 and the more recent Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009.

This chapter sets the question of effective multilateralism within the broader analysis of global order and the ways in which the patterns of global order and the understanding of global order have evolved in the period since the end of the Cold War. In the 1990s, dominant western understandings about multilateralism were firmly rooted within the context of economic globalization and an apparently stable western-centred global liberal order. In the early 2000s, multilateralism was frequently viewed through the prism of US hegemony. Now, the picture is one of flux, fluidity and great uncertainty. This chapter seeks to shed light on some of the principal features of the contemporary global order and some of the major sources of this uncertainty.