ABSTRACT
The emerging inter-related world necessitates a social work perspective which has to deal with global issues that are neither localised nor nation-specifi c but rather have a transnational character such as: increased incidences of communal strife; civil war; cross-border confl icts; terrorism; problems of refugees; violence against women; hunger; AIDS; environmental degradation etc. ‘Unless we can offer an alternative to the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, the epoch on whose threshold we stand – post-communist, post-industrial, post-national, yet sectarian, fearful, and bigoted – is likely also to be post-democratic’ (Barber 2004). The fast-paced powerful juggernaut of globalisation is commonly viewed as a Western evil-incarnated ideology out to annihilate non-Western culture, resisted by traditional cultural protagonists leading to cultural strife. Besides contributing to paranoid, parochial recidivist tribalism as seen in Bosnia, Rwanda, Ossetia and Iraq, it seems to drag humanity into new miseries where mostly the weaker sections, minorities, women and children suffer.
