In 2002, years before the financial crash and the onslaught of austerity measures the world over, Walden Bello argued that we were entering a historical maelstrom marked by prolonged economic crisis, the re-emergence of imperialist contradictions and the spread of global resistance. In short, the neoliberal, globalist project was in crisis. A decade later, the question of how to manage the global economy - and, more fundamentally, whether humanity wishes it to go in an ever more market-oriented, transnational corporation-dominated, and capital-footloose direction - remains the most important international question of our time.
In this short and trenchant history of the World Bank, IMF, WTO and the G8, Bello points to their manifest failings and examines new ideas put forward for reforming the management of the world economy. Arguing for a fundamental shift towards a decentralized, pluralistic system of global economic governance which would allow countries to follow development strategies sensitive to their own values, constraints and opportunities, Deglobalization is a powerful dissection of contemporary capitalism's multiple crises and a scathing indictment of the West's subordination of the Global South in the interests of multinational corporations and banks.
A stirring call to arms for all those who still believe in global economic justice.
Author Biography
Walden Bello is a member of the House of Representatives of the Republic of the Philippines. He is currently also an adjunct professor at the State University of New York at Binghamton and at St Mary's University in Halifax, Canada; he has also been professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines. He was founding director of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the Institute for Food and Development Policy (Food First) in Oakland, California. He is the author or co-author of seventeen books, including 'Dilemmas of Domination: the Unraveling of the American Empire' and 'Capitalism's Last Stand'. He obtained his Ph.D. in sociology from Princeton University.
