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About CGS
Events
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December 3rd, 2004 5:00 PM
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Lincoln Hall 336
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Description:
The war in Iraq is broadly explained as a "war on terrorism" by its supporters and detractors alike. I argue that instead, once we put the war into geographical and historical context, a very different picture emerges. When we take into account the political geography of Iraq's creation and the episodic history of US global ambition, it becomes increasingly clear that this war represents an attempt to complete the work of globalization, a vision of global power first announced in the late 1970s. If this vision emanates primarily from New York and Washington it is nonetheless itself global. The war in Iraq explicitly targets an alternative global vision emanating from the Middle East -- a triumphalist sense of the endgame of globalization. Against the backdrop of earlier efforts at US global ambition, when nationalism combined with political opposition to became in different ways fatal to that ambition, failure in Iraq suggests that the endgame of globalization may come to pass in a much more negative way.
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Full-Text of Paper (pdf)
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Speakers:
Neil Smith, City University of New York
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Biography:
Neil Smith is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he also directs the Center for Place, Culture and Politics. He recently won the LA Times Book Prize for Biography (2003) for his book American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (2003). He works on the broad connections between space, social theory and history, and among his eight books are New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City (1996) and Uneven Development: Nature, Capital and the Production of Space (1991). He has been called the father of gentrification theory, and is author of more than 140 articles and book chapters and his work has been translated into ten languages. He has been awarded Honors for Distinguished Scholarship by the Association of American Geographers and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, and has held visiting professorships across the world, and he is an organizer of the International Critical Geography Group. His newest book is The Endgame of Globalization (Routledge, 2005). He also directs a large Ford Foundation sponsored project to synthesize the work produced in and around the Ford initiative and an edited volume from this work has been completed (Creative Destruction: Area Knowledge and the New Geographies of Empire, with Christian Parenti).
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Co-Sponsors:
Sociology, Geography, Political Science, Regional and Urban Planning, Center for Global Studies
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