ABSTRACT
The politics of scale have long been an endemic feature of capitalist modernity that many of these chapters seek to illuminate. However, struggles and strategies over scale have become particularly salient and noticeable during the contemporary period of financialization and the consequent turmoil of unsettled states, movements in flux, and people in motion across complex timelines, confronting the speeding up and slowing down of time in the multiple contexts of their daily lives. Here, the editors provide a trenchant overview of the book, beginning in Part I, “Scales of Domination: Transnational Migration and its Discontents.” Chapters in this first part connect scalar transformations with transnational migrants made vulnerable because of the work done on their mobile bodies. Part II, “Problematizing the Nation and the Nation-State,” examines contemporary processes and strategies that challenge the nation-state and are associated with capitalist globalization – not only in the current period, but also historically. In Part III, “Rescaling Sovereignty: The Case of the European Union and its Outside Insiders,” the chapters reconsider the sovereignty of the nation-state and of transnational states looking to the European Union, a much-contested and recent creation, as a model. Chapters in Part IV, “The Longue Durée,” on the histories of changing scales of movements revisit historical debates on uneven and combined development, and set out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic, which prefigure contemporary struggles of labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development. Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their efforts to build class alliances and political blocs.
