ABSTRACT

As globalization has become the leitmotif of the past three decades or so, the global has come to be viewed by many as the scale to which all social actions must respond. This is evident in the myriad statements that take the form of “we must do X because of the power of global capital and global institutions.” In such discourses the global has become the scale from which there is no possibility of escape, “the scale which denies us the geographical option of fleeing to a distant spatial sanctuary in some remote corner of the planet wherein we can insulate ourselves from the consequences of contemporary social and natural processes” (Herod

or the loss of national sovereignty, the global seems to have emerged as the primus inter pares scale of late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century social life and social theorizing.