Routledge
142 pages | 12 B/W Illus.
Whether we talk about human learning and unlearning, securitization, or political economy, the forces and mechanisms generating both globalization and disintegration are causally efficacious across the world. Thus, the processes that led to the victory of the ‘Leave’ campaign in the June 2016 referendum on UK European Union membership are not simply confined to the United Kingdom, or even Europe. Similarly, conflict in Ukraine and the presidency of Donald Trump hold implications for a stage much wider than EU-Russia or the United States alone.
Patomäki explores the world-historical mechanisms and processes that have created the conditions for the world’s current predicaments and, arguably, involve potential for better futures. Operationally, he relies on the philosophy of dialectical critical realism and on the methods of contemporary social sciences, exploring how crises, learning and politics are interwoven through uneven wealth-accumulation and problematical growth-dynamics. Seeking to illuminate the causes of the currently prevailing tendencies towards disintegration, antagonism and – ultimately – war, he also shows how these developments are in fact embedded in deeper processes of human learning. The book embraces a Wellsian warning about the increasingly likely possibility of a military disaster, but its central objective is to further enlightenment and holoreflexivity within the current world-historical conjuncture.
This work will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations, peace research, security studies and international political economy.
Have we arrived to a New World Disorder? Well, the UK is not any more a stabilising power in Europe, and the US has stopped functioning as stabiliser in the global system. Behind these structural changes we find the manyfold failures of neoliberal economics. In the footsteps of Keynes, Polanyi and Habermas, Heikki Patomäki uncovers the causes and dynamics of these complex crises, but also identifies the keys of a progressive project that can save the legacy of enlightenment and democratic politics in Europe, as well as the world system, and help finding the way back to social progress.
- László Andor, Former EU Commissionner for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion
This series is designed to break new ground in the literature on globalisation and its academic and popular understanding. Rather than perpetuating or simply reacting to the economic understanding of globalisation, this series seeks to capture the term and broaden its meaning to encompass a wide range of issues and disciplines and convey a sense of alternative possibilities for the future.
