Historical Materialism and Globalisation: Essays on Continuity and Change

Interest in globalisation has been growing over the last decade, and it has become clear recently that mass popular movements are increasingly concerned with the politics of globalisation. In these circumstances, the revival of interest in historical materialism within international studies takes on a broader significance. In Historical Materialism and Globalisation, pioneers of this tradition are brought together with innovative young scholars whose work will shape the next generation of critical international studies scholarship. Now that soviet style socialism has collapsed upon itself and liberal capitalism offers itself as the natural, necessary and absolute condition of human social life on a world-wide scale, this book insists that the potentially emancipatory resources of a renewed, and perhaps reconstructed, historical materialism are more relevant in today’s world than ever before. Rather than viewing global capitalism as an ineluctable natural force, these essays seek to show how a dialectic of power and resistance is at work in the contemporary global political economy, producing and contesting new realities, and creating conditions in which new forms of collective self determination become thinkable and materially possible. It will be vital, topical reading for anyone interested in international relations, international political economy, sociology and political theory.