Results by title

Geopolitical Economy examines the significance and nature of free trade agreements (FTAs), the primary policy tool through which modern nations seek access to international markets and promote economic growth. The book focuses specifically on how South Korea, the world’s leader in the number and significance of FTAs as well as the world’s sixth largest export economy, uses FTAs.

Jonathan Krieckhaus argues that geopolitics—the struggle between powerful nations over specific geographic regions around the globe—influenced FTA strategy and economic policy in South Korea and beyond. This perspective illustrates the security approach to FTAs, but adds that the geographic specificity of security concerns deeply shape FTA policy.

Geopolitical Economy also looks at Korean FTAs through the lens of development strategy. South Korea is singularly successful in garnering FTAs with all three players in the global economy: the United States, the European Union, and China. This unprecedented success was built on a strong commitment from three consecutive Korean presidential administrations, each operating within a favorable state-society context that enjoyed the existence of a centralized and effective trade bureaucracy.

In Global Shadows the renowned anthropologist James Ferguson moves beyond the traditional anthropological focus on local communities to explore more general questions about Africa and its place in the contemporary world. Ferguson develops his argument through a series of provocative essays which open—as he shows they must—into interrogations of globalization, modernity, worldwide inequality, and social justice. He maintains that Africans in a variety of social and geographical locations increasingly seek to make claims of membership within a global community, claims that contest the marginalization that has so far been the principal fruit of “globalization” for Africa. Ferguson contends that such claims demand new understandings of the global, centered less on transnational flows and images of unfettered connection than on the social relations that selectively constitute global society and on the rights and obligations that characterize it.

Ferguson points out that anthropologists and others who have refused the category of Africa as empirically problematic have, in their devotion to particularity, allowed themselves to remain bystanders in the broader conversations about Africa. In Global Shadows, he urges fellow scholars into the arena, encouraging them to find a way to speak beyond the academy about Africa’s position within an egregiously imbalanced world order.