| Overview
Over the past three decades, processes and forces linked to globalization have dramatically altered the state-market-society relationship associated with the welfare state of the mid-201h century. The traditional components of social action-movements of labor, civil rights, etc.-are being transformed and undermined as they have been squeezed by economic change as well as challenged to modern conceptions of equality, rights and group membership. New social forces and movements have become prominent as older social frameworks have fragmented. Regional, ethnic, religious, issue and identity-based movements challenge more traditional conceptions of national discourse, democratic regulation based in civil society and the very borders of the nation-state. These new movements represent a key element of the globalization process, integral to it but challenging it, too. Global Civil Society and Social Forces seeks to understand this "double movement" of cohesion and fragmentation as it occurs in the social, cultural and political arenas. It strives to explain how such changes foster or obstruct the goals of social justice, human welfare and democratization.
Projects
- Globalization, State Capacity, and Self-Determination: Comparative Muslim States, Movements, Networks and Strategies, (PI: Paul Lubeck, Sociology). Funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and UCSC campus funds, this project is directed toward an examination of the relationships between neo-liberal globalization and the rise of Islamic movements, particularly jihadist ones. This project will culminate in an international conference in Spring 2005, to be held in the Netherlands.
- Global Civil Society and Corporate Responisibility, (PI: Ronnie D. Lipschutz, Politics). The global expansion of markets has, in the absence of strong international enforcement mechanisms, generated a host of privatized regulatory initiatives that seek to moderate the harder edges of “self-regulation.” This project has generated a book, Regulation for the Rest of Us? to be published by Routledge in 2005.
- Environmental Justice (PI: Ravi Rajan)
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