globalization

What determines the flow of labor and capital in this new global information economy? Who has the capacity to coordinate this new system, to create some measure of order? What happens to territoriality and sovereignty, two fundamental principles of the modern state? And who gains rights and who loses rights?

Accounts of U.S. empire building in Latin America typically portray politically and economically powerful North Americans descending on their southerly neighbors to engage in lopsided negotiations. Dennis Merrill's comparative history of U.S. tourism in Latin America in the twentieth century demonstrates that empire is a more textured, variable, and interactive system of inequality and resistance than commonly assumed.

Translated by Assenka Oksiloff.

The article endeavors to address hope to address here ethical obligations that are global in character and that emerge both at a distance and within relations of proximity. The two questions that concern the author are at first quite different from one another. The first is whether any of us have the capacity or inclination to respond ethically to suffering at a distance and what makes that ethical encounter possible, when it does take place.

A recent movement has extended previous emphases on the rights of national citizens by asserting the global human rights of all persons. This article describes the extent to which this change is reflected in the language of national constitutions around the world. Human rights language – formerly absent from almost all constitutions – now appears in most of them. Rather than characterizing developed or democratic states, human rights language is, first, especially common in countries most susceptible to global influences.

While globalization is largely theorized in terms of trans‐border flows, this article suggests an exploratory sociological framework for analyzing globalization as consisting of systemic processes of closure and containment. The suggested framework points at the emergence of a global mobility regime that actively seeks to contain social movement both within and across borders.

When do national movements adopt or reject international agendas? This question regarding the relationship between global and local thinking goes to the heart of the current globalization debates. This study examines the contrasting responses from the Chinese and Indian women's movements to the agenda adopted by the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. The contrast challenges the dominant assumption that global thinking can substitute for local thinking.

This article asks three questions. How does the sociologist understand the common sense of subaltern groups, whether subjugated on the basis of gender, class, race, ethnicity or nationality? What could be the political practice of the sociologist with regard to such groups? Finally, through what form of public discourse can sociology articulate the interests of subaltern groups? These broad questions have general answers, even if their specifics are shaped by national and local contexts.

Literature on global care work deals with biopolitical tensions between care markets and exclusionary migration regimes leading to the formation of transnational families. Nevertheless, it disregards how these tensions produce “illegal” families within countries of destination, catalyzing the mobilization of moral claims over their recognition in the local civil society.

This article addresses AIDS as a pandemic of changing social conditions. It reviews the form and consequences of several persistent responses to AIDS (denial, marginalization and urgency) both from within the context of the epidemic in North America and globally. Sociologists are called on to see AIDS as a rich environment for the application and testing of theories, with sociology seen as a discipline whose presence is required for understanding and potentially resolving social challenges produced by AIDS.