This article identifies two common academic discourses about globalization: that it is a “new” process unleashing fundamentally novel changes on society, and that it is an “old” process merely extending and building from previous events. Drawing from recent advances in social, cultural, and political theory, the article critiques both of these discourses and articulates four discursive themes—homogenization, aggrandizing, flexibility, and erasure—that occur in the way that both proponents and opponents conceive of globalization. Instead of treating globalization as homogeneous and all-encompassing, (...) the author argues that it should be treated as a concept perennially in motion, a discourse continually under reconstruction. Tracing the representations and contradictions located within globalization helps to de-naturalize and re-politicize it. In this way, globalization can be viewed as a contested discourse constituted through the convergence of social, political, and economic ideologies. (shrink)

This article examines how the Iraq War was a space in the ongoing geographical extension of global capitalism linked tousforeign policy. Was it simply the decision by a unitary, hegemonic actor in the inter-state system overriding concerns from other states? Was it an imperialist move to secure the ‘global oil spigot’? Alternatively, did the use of military force reflect the interests and emergence of a transnational state apparatus? We argue that theusimperium needs to be conceptualised as a specific form of (...) state, within which and through which fractions of national and transnational capital operate. In so doing, the Iraq War is assessed as a moment in the extension of global capitalism in which the interests of a national fraction of capital within theusstate form was dominant, thereby placing processes of class struggle and their relation to wider spaces of imperialism at the centre of analysis. (shrink)