Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent
struggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seen
as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up
or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at
which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations
redefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movements
build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices
are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book,
consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural
studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and
spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.
Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries
and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees
are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addresses
the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical moments
and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part
III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on
"Brexit" and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern
Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of
movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development,
and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthand
nineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles of
labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development.
Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are
constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their
eff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.
About the Author: Donald M. Nonini, Professor of Anthropology, University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, has undertaken research in Malaysia, Australia, and the
United States on citizenship in the Chinese diaspora; U.S. local politics; and
on the commons. His latest book is "Getting by" Class and State Formation
among Chinese in Malaysia (Cornell University Press, 2015).
Ida Susser, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College
and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, has published on
popular mobilizations, social movements, and the urban commons in the
United States, Europe, and Southern Africa. Her books include Norman
Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Neighborhood (Oxford University Press,
2012) and the co- edited volumes, Rethinking America (CRC Press, 2009) and
Wounded Cities (Berg, 2003).
