THE CONTEMPORARY WORLD

What does Contemporary World mean to you?

Answer: The conditions and notions of the present-day era. Anything that happens, exists, lives, and about
to occur during the present time.

What is the relationship between contemporary world and globalization?

Answer: The two are considered to be analogous. In fact, globalization is popularly recognized in terms of
the contemporary world.

GLOBALIZATION Definitions
Broad and Inclusive:
Ohmae (1992) – Globalization means the onset of the borderless world…
Narrow and Exclusive:
Robert Cox (2000) – Globalization includes the internationalizing of production, the new
international division of labor, new migratory movements from South to North, the new
competitive environment that accelerates these processes, and the internationalizing of the
state…

No matter how one classifies a definition of globalization, the concept is complex and
multifaceted as the definitions deal with either economic, political, or social dimensions.

What is the similarity in the definitions of Ohmae & Cox?

Answer:
Explain why the definitions of Ohmae is broad and inclusive, while Cox’s is narrow and exclusive.
Answer:
Ritzer (2015) defines globalization as a transplanetary process or a set of processes involving
increasing liquidity and the growing multidirectional flows of people, objects, places and information as
well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows...

Dimensions of Globalization
1. Economics
2. Politics
3. Society

Metaphors of Globalization (Solid, Liquid, Flows)

Solids are regarded as barriers that prevent or make difficult the movement of things. It can be
natural, man-made or modern man-made.

e.g. Natural Solids : landforms and bodies of water

Man-made : Great Wall of China and Berlin Wall
Modern man-made : Nine-dash line of China (South China Sea)

Liquid refers to the ease of movement of people, things, information, and places in the
contemporary world. As a state of matter, it takes the shape of its container.

Characteristics of Liquid according to Zygmunt Bauman & Ritzer:

 1. It changes quickly and their aspects, spatial (space) and temporal (time), are in continuous
fluctuation. E.g. stock market
2. Its movement is difficult to stop. E.g. viral videos over youtube, facebook
3. The forces (the liquid ones) make political boundaries more permeable to the flow of people
and things.
4. It tends to melt whatever stands in its path (especially solids). E.g. the decline, if not death, of
a nation.

Flows, as described in contemporary world, describes any sort of domestic, cross-border and
broader international movement of goods, services, capital, and people.

Globalization can be considered as a system of flows:

(Source: https://transportgeography.org/contents/chapter7/globalization-international-trade/flows-globalization/ )

1. Freight (trade). Mainly asymmetrical flows taking place to satisfy material demands ranging
from raw materials to finished goods and all the intermediate goods in between. The
asymmetry is reflective of trade imbalances as well as the general linear organization of
supply chains (upstream to downstream). Flows are mainly supported by maritime shipping
with port infrastructures acting as the main gateways of this flow system, but airports play an
important role in the trade of high-value goods. Trade networks are organized as
interconnected hub-and-spoke structures along the main poles of the global economy.
2. Passengers (migration). Mainly symmetrical flows of people taking place for a variety of
reasons, most of them related to tourism with air transportation being the dominant mode
supporting such flows. The global air transport system can handle about four million
passengers per day and is organized as interconnected hub-and-spoke networks converging
around major airports.
3. Information (telecommunications). The complex and extensive flows of information used for
communication, power exchanges (e.g. an online order), and symbolic exchanges (e.g.
education). Information flows can both take a physical (e.g. parcels) and non-physical form,
which are dominantly articulated by a network of global cities. While communication flows
are mostly symmetrical, power and symbolic exchanges are asymmetrical (from the
information provider to the consumer of information).

The International Monetary Fund (IMF), in 2000, identified four basic aspects of globalization:
a) trade and transactions,
b) capital and investment movements,
c) migration and movement of people, and
d) dissemination of knowledge.

What does the International Monetary Fund do? https://home.treasury.gov/policy-issues/international/international-monetary-fund

The IMF is an organization of 189 member countries that works to foster global monetary
cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and
sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world.

What is the role of IMF in globalization? https://www.imf.org/en/About/Factsheets/Sheets/2022/IMF-World-Bank-New

The IMF promotes global macroeconomic and financial stability and provides policy advice and
capacity development support to help countries build and maintain strong economies.
 In June 2006, people flows refers to the movement of people across international borders in the
form of immigration, international student flows, business travel, and tourism.
(https://www.nber.org/papers/w12315#:~:text=Issue%20Date%20June%202006,%2C%20business%20travel%2C%20and%20tourism.)

Globalization Theories

Homogeneity refers to the increasing sameness in the world as cultural inputs, economic factors,
and political orientations of societies expand to create common practices, same economies, and similar
forms of government.

In culture, homogeneity is often linked to cultural imperialism. This means, a given culture
influences other cultures.
E.g.
 Christianity
 Americanization (Kuisel, 1993)
 neoliberalism, capitalism, “One-size-fits-all approach of IMF [Rich countries become
advantageous in the world economy at the expense of poor countries. (Stiglitz, 2002)],”
 McWorld [Only one political orientation is growing in today’s societies. (Barber, 1995)]
 media imperialism [undermines the existence of alternative global media originating from
developing countries (Cowen, 2002)],
 Grobalization [a process wherein nations, corporations, etc. impose themselves on
geographic areas in order to gain profits, power, and so on. (Ryan, 2007)]
 New media (Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Twitter, IG, etc)
 Hactivists (activism to the internet by hacking computer programs [Juris, 2005])

Heterogeneity pertains to the creation of various cultural practices, new economies, and political
groups because of the interactions of elements from different societies in the world. It refers to the
differences because of either lasting differences or of the hybrids or combinations of cultures that can be
produced through the different transplanetary processes.
 Cultural Hybridization approach emphasizes the integration of global and local cultures
(Cvetkovich & Kellner, 1997).
 Glocalization (Robertson, 1992) is the interpenetration of the global and local resulting in
unique outcomes in different geographic areas (Giullanotti & Robertson, 2007).

5 Perspectives on the Origins of Globalization

1) Hardwired
To make human lives better, our ancestors in Africa walked out in the late Ice Age (Chanda,
2007). This relates to the 4 aspects of globalization: a) trade, b) missionary work, c) adventures, and d)
conquest.

2) Cycles
This refers to the long-term cyclical process of globalization making it disappear or reappear.

3) Epoch
It is also called wave.
6 Great Epochs of Globalization
1) Globalization of Religion (4th- 7th centuries)
 2) European colonial conquests (late 15th century)
3) Intra-European Wars (late 18th – early 19th centuries)
4) Heyday of European Imperialism (mid-19th century to 1918)
5) Post-World War II period (WW2 [Sep 1939 – Sep 1945])
6) Post-Cold War period (Cold War [Mar 1947 – Dec 1991])
4) Events
a) Roman Conquest (AD 43-87)
b) Rampage of the armies of Genghis Khan (13th century)
c) Voyages of Discovery
 Vasco de Gama in Cape of Good Hope in 1498
 Ferdinand Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe (1522)
 Christopher Columbus (America in 1942)
 First transatlantic telephone cable (1956)
 First transatlantic television broadcast (1962)
 Founding of the modern Internet (1988)
 Terrorist attack on the Twin Towers in New York (2001)
d) Technological Advances
 First transatlantic telephone cable (1956)
 First transatlantic television broadcast (1962)
 Founding of the modern Internet (1988)
e) Terrorist attack
 Twin Towers in New York (2011)

5) Broad Changes
Three (3) Notable Changes
a) The emergence of the United States as the global power (post World War II)
 Germany & Japan were outrun by the US in terms of industry
 US dominated the globe in terms of diplomacy, media, film, etc.
b) The emergence of multinational corporations (MNCs)
 US, Germany & Great Britain had their homeland great corporations until today, but the
expansion of the US led in the exportation and opening of factories in other countries.
c) The demise of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War
 The fall of USSR in 1991 made way for the global processes – immigration, tourism, media,
diplomacy, and MNCs.
 It paved way for the “free world” making China a major force in global capitalism
(Fishmnan, 2006)

What does HARP stand for in military?

Project HARP, short for High Altitude Research Project, was a joint venture of the United States
Department of Defense and Canada's Department of National Defense created with the goal of studying
ballistics of re-entry vehicles and collecting upper atmospheric data for research.

Is DARPA military?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency serves as the central research and development
organization of the Department of Defense.
What is Gain-of-function research?
 Gain-of-function research (GOFR) refers to the serial passaging of microorganisms to increase
their transmissibility, virulence, immunogenicity, and host tropism by applying selective pressure to a
culture.
GOF is performed to understand how a pathogen adapts to environmental pressures, thereby
allowing disease control measures to be better planned, as well as potential vaccines and therapies to be
explored. Gene editing technologies such as clustered, regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats
(CRISPR) may be utilized in combination with selective serial passaging to investigate the role of specific
genes on protein expression and ultimate organism function.
GOFR is a subset of "dual-use research" and involves experiments usually performed to improve
the understanding of disease-causing pathogens, their interaction with human hosts, and their potential
to cause pandemics.
GOFR aims to inform public health and preparedness efforts, as well as support the development
of medical countermeasures (MCM) when conducted by responsible scientists.
Although some scientists argue that GOFR poses an unjustified risk to public health, this research
has contributed indefinitely to the development of MCM, including vaccines like the yellow fever
vaccine.
GOF experiments also help scientists understand how close a newly emerged pathogen is to
mammalian transmission. In this context, GOFR can allow researchers to identify the lowest number of
mutations needed for a naturally occurring pathogen in animals to be able to infect humans.
Public health authorities could immediately intervene if the pathogen is one mutation away from
spillover. Conversely, if the pathogen is 20 mutations from reaching humans, it may be more appropriate
to instead closely monitor this pathogen without making any sudden decisions.

The origins of GOFR

The term GOFR originated from two controversial research experiments involving mutated
versions of the H5N1 avian influenza virus, wherein ferrets were infected with airborne viral particles.
Although H5N1 was associated with a mortality rate of 60% when it was in circulation in the early
2000s, it had limited person-person transmissibility. Nevertheless, concerns that H5N1 could evolve to
transmit more effectively among humans while retaining its high mortality rate led researchers to
develop non-natural mutated strains for in vivo testing. These experiments demonstrated that it was
possible for this virus to become airborne and that the strain was sensitive to certain antiviral drugs.
When the two research groups that conducted these studies attempted to publish their findings,
the United States National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity, an advisory committee to the Director
of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), requested publication be halted. These precautions arose from
fears that details of these experiments, including the genetic changes that were induced to increase the
transmissibility of the tested strains, might be exploited to create biological weapons.