[W1] Introduction to International Studies
[L1] Course Introduction Aug 28, 2023
* Resources: (1) Textbook, “Introduction”, P. 1-16.
Course Overview
This course is designed to introduce you to the broad and ever-growing topic of globalization. At its core, globalization refers to increasing connectedness and interaction and border-crossing between individuals, organizations, and governments across national boundaries. The goal of this class is to learn to identify who has precisely what at stake in a globalizing world. Who benefits from what particular definitions or projects of globalization? And who loses from the same? Additionally, our project in this class is to come to terms with complex and often contradictory ways that globalization appears both in discourse and in practice. We will consider viewpoints from the following set of lenses: political economy, international politics, culture and globalization, human rights, international migration, war, peace, and security, global health and disease, and the global environment.
Student Learning Outcomes
Upon completion of INTLSD 101, you should be able to:
• Develop an understanding of global patterns and processes and their interaction with society
• Demonstrate an understanding of the interconnectedness, difference, and diversity of a global society
• Apply awareness of global issues to a consideration of individual or collective responsibilities within a global society
• Devise analytical, practical, or creative responses to global problems or issues
I. Introduction
1. Reading, PPT, Lecture: Exam (Textbook expand)
2. International studies: interactions between two or more countries (or states), and with what these countries share or have in common.
3. International relations: political and economic interactions between states.
4. Globalization: both a process and a phenomenon, involving the
evolution and effects of the development of the links between people, institutions,
and governments in different parts of the world. (The process by which the political, economic, social, and cultural links among people, institutions, states, and governments
become integrated at a global level.)
5. Globalism: an ideology, a set of beliefs, or an attitude that favors a global view of politics, economics, and society, and supports the kinds of trends we find in globalization. (A philosophy, ideology, or policy based on taking a global view of politics, economics, society, culture, security, and the environment.)
6. Global studies: The systematic study of the global system and of its related features, qualities, trends, institutions, processes, and problems.
- Human rights: the rights that all of us have by virtue of being human, and they rise above citizenship of a particular country or community.
7. Global system: The collected elements and components – including people, institutions, principles, procedures, norms, and habits – whose interactions make up the global whole.
II. International Studies - Four Principles
EXAM - MIDTERM) 약간 application 같은 사례를 주고 4가지 중에 어떤 특징을 나타내고 있는지 골라내야 할 것 같음 → examples 각각 뭐가 있는지 물어보기
1. Transnational
(1) concerned with events, ideas, activities, phenomena that are not limited by state boundaries.
(2) indicates the borders of the states with which most of us most readily identify, and at which level most of the decisions that most immediately impact us are made.
2. Integral (relational)
(1) unites us rather than what divides us, and with the manner in which decisions are shaped and implemented at the global level. All states are influenced by the actions of other states, econ are impacted by cross-border investment and trade.
3. Inclusive
(1) x see the world from the perspective of any one group of people, but works to engage with the multiple perspectives of the entire human race.
(2) Global literacy, awareness and belonging.
4. Interdisciplinary
(1) looks at the world from multiple perspectives, including those of history, geography, sociology, anthropology, demography, science, technology, politics, law, and economics.
III. The world as a community of 100 people
1. There is an even split between men and women.
2. Asians dominate.
3. The community is aging.
4. Unequal access to education.
5. A large minority lacks shelter.
6. Democracy for the minority.
7. A small minority controls most of the wealth.
8. Urban areas dominate.
9. Few members of the community eat well.
10. Access to health care is unequal.
11. Unequal internet connection.
12. Many languages are spoken.
13. Many religions are followed.
[W2] The Rise of the Global System
[L2] The Rise of the Global System Sep 6, 2023
* Resources: Textbook, “The Rise of the Global System”, P. 17-38
I. Eurocentrism
1. Eurocentrism: A set of ideological assumptions about how the modern world came to be that favors Western civilization in opposition to Eastern civilization.
2. Three ideological assumptions:
(1) Assumption 1: the superiority of the west
- Culturally, economically, politically the values and technology that they have.
- All the way back in history, it was a permanent part of the west.
(2) Assumption 2: the agency of the west
- In Europe, the US they make history, move progressive movements, the rest are acted upon.
- East: stagnancy.
- West: colonize the East.
(3) Assumption 3: the universalism of the west
- Universal to everyone. Universal application
- Once introduced, inheritance values better.
Three comes to form the master narrative: “The Rise of the West”
→ Ancient Greece, Rome, Italian commerce, Renaissance, Industrialization, modern democracy, French revolution, capitalism
→ The West is just a linear progression moving up in history.
II. Worldcentrism
Worldcentrism: A non-Eurocentric explanation of how the modern world came to be that accounts for how the West was conditioned and constrained by global forces
Consider the outside of the west. Everything is internal to the West.
1. Contingencies: historical events that only occur or exist because of other historical events they are dependent upon (여기서는 수반성을 뜻함)
2. Accidents: historical events that are unpredictable and beyond human control
ex) most accident: natural occurrences, weather, climate conditions, geology, natural resources, fertile soil, biology
Having a lot of resources is an accident, but labor issues and killing indigenous people are contingencies.
3. Conjunctures: when accidents and contingencies independent of one other come together to interact and create a unique historical moment
ex) unique conjuncture like Ukraine War → energy crisis, pandemic(COVID-19) → supply chain issues.
<The eight regional circuits of the multi-polar world economy (1400 AD) >
1. Multiple centers of power. (not today like US is a center of power)
2. 8 regional systems have dense populations, and trade and culture exchange in a circuit.
3. Mid Asia linked up with the Silk Road.
4. Most trade happens in the Indian ocean(모두 만나는 약속의 장소 느낌). The Indian ocean was quite peaceful.
5. At that time, the western European was underdeveloped, and had low quality of life.
III. Three Conjunctures
1. Iberian Imperialism - (East)
Europeans tried to find the way to get to India because India sold spices that Europe x had. (Also political issue)
| (1) The Ottoman Empire contingency | (2) The Ming Dynasty Contingency | (3) The Indian Settlements in India (1498-1739) |
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1. Iberian Imperialism (West)
| (3) The Immunity Accident, The Resource Accident, The Chinese Silver Contingency |
Massive consequence with two main accidents.
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2. British Imperialism - (East)
| (1) The Mughal Empire contingency | (2) The French contingency |
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2. British Imperialism - West
| (3) The Climate Accident, The Slave Trade Contingency |
(1) The climate Accident:
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3. The Industrial Revolution
(1) Always have problems with land. Climate change logical collapse land problem.
(2) Their ideology colonialism; Colonization is important.
(3) As the population increased, there were only finite resources. (Constraining resources)
→ Solve this problem (scarce resources) by 2 accidents.
4. (1) The accident of Land
- English “Ghost acre”
- They made a lot of cotton and sold them to English people cheaply. → generate large market
- Lots of food, chocolate (calories) → become more productive
(2) The accident of Coal
- England has an immense amount of coal, surface mining, and easy to transport coal.
- Charcoal: can get hot, but not that hot
- Coal: can be really really hot. → to manufacture steel, which is very resilient and hard → railroad, steam engine. → improve productivity of agriculture and technology.
“A better way to think about the Industrial Revolution is that it proceeded by finding land-saving mechanisms. Throughout the Old World, from China in the east to England in the west, shortages of land to produce the necessities of life were putting limits on any further growth at all, let alone allowing a leap into a different kind of economic future… Without coal or colonies… Britons would have to devote more and more of their land and labor to food production, further constraining resources”
5. Modern global system: global north and global south.
Two major interconnected one another.
[W3] The Global Economy
[L3] The Capitalist World Economy Sep 11, 2023
* Resources: (1) Textbook, “The Global Economy”, P. 195-205; 209-216
I. Capitalism
1. The Endless Accumulation of Capital
Commodities: factories, machines, tools, labor power (paying).
Reinvestment to start a new cycle again. Have to have this process to constitute capitalism. Companies grow and expand. → The endless accumulation of Capital
2. The generalized production of commodities
Prior to capitalism, most people meet products, not commodities to survive.
(1) Product: a thing that satisfies as human want or need
→ Make dinner, hunter-gatherers, make products themselves
(2) Commodity: a thing that satisfies a human want or need that is then exchanged for other commodities in a market.
→ Universal and primary commodities: money
→ existed through history
II. Feature 1: The Technical Division of Labor
1. The technical division of labor: the division of the labor process of a given commodity into specialized subtasks
2. Before capitalism
(1) most products and commodities usually were made by one person.
ex) shoemaker who makes the entire shoe, basket weaver who makes the whole basket.
→ Everyone has a job of making an entire commodity themselves
3. Under capitalism
(1) Division of labor transformed into technical division of Labor (a commodity is made by several people, not just one as the tasks are divided)
(2) Technical division of labor is a revolution in labor productivity through faster and more production.
ex) Adam Smith's pen factory (Wealth of Nations)
- People employed to make a single pen rather than just one person who makes the entire pen.
- One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head.
- The important business of making a pen is in this manner divided into about 18 distinct operations, which in some manufacturers are performed by distinct hands.
- Result: made a lot more pins to sell in the market and it saved a lot of money for the capitalist. With the industrial revolution, this practice became widespread, but you can't have an entire population of people in a country doing dull work for making low wages, so this work gets exported over time to other countries.
2. Globalization:
III. Feature 2: Unequal Exchange
1. Unequal exchange: the exploitation of real minimum wage differentials through global labor arbitrage.
(1) ex) T-shirt costs about $30.00. Most of the $30 goes to the retailer selling which is about 60%. But only .6% of the cost goes to the garment worker in Bangladesh who made that T-shirt. Retailers want to sell at a price that's much higher than needed, even above what they need for a profit. Usually because retailers have monopoly or quasi monopoly status.
→ unequal exchange because labor is paid a wage far below what the T-shirt is eventually sold for.
2. Global Wage Arbitrage: the substitution of domestic high-wave workers with low-wage workers abroad in the production of commodities.
(1) Reasons that could drive the globalization of the technical division of Labor:
- Ideal locations, environmental factors, cheap raw materials.
- The main factor: cheap labor
→ Low wages apply to all branches of economic production.
ex) the monthly minimum wage for garment workers in 2019.
Garment workers: make T-shirts and other sorts of garments in the clothing industry.
- the wage differentials in the US = average $1000/month.
- China = $217.00/month.
- Vietnam = $151.00/ month.
- Bangladesh. = $63/month now. (massive, most are women, 2nd largest exporter of Western garment fashion brands)
3. ex) of unequal change: <Behind the AI boom, an army of overseas workers in ‘digital sweatshops’>
- 1000 thousands of workers in the Philippines log online every day to annotate masses of data for American companies like ChatGPT to train the AI models
- boring work like labeling images, editing chunks of text.
- Automated driving is still very bad and dangerous because AI cars can't discern a human or another car from the background, so they need humans to input that data to make the distinction right.
- AI relies very heavily on a lot of human labor, which is exploitative.
- Workers are paid at extremely low rates, pay is often withheld, there's no worker rights, and AI companies do not abide by basic Labor Standards for workers abroad.
- The Philippines get paid about $0.60 a day for this work. = digital sweatshops.
IV. Feature 3: Core, Periphery, Semi-Periphery
EXAM TERM) Core, Periphery, Semi-Periphery
1. World Map: 3 factors of world ranking of all countries - GDP per capita, location of the number and wealth of the world’s billionaires, and location of world’s largest corporations.
The map tells us there's differences in power relations between countries in the core and periphery, and this power is the chief cause of inequality due to unequal exchange.
(1) core: countries that exploit the most from unequal exchange
- Blue: Western Europe, North America, Australia, New Zealand.
- Have diverse economic structures, including usually the services sector, manufacturing, agriculture, raw resource extraction
- tend to have monopolies for corporations
(2) periphery: countries that are most exploited by unequal exchange.
- Red: sub-Saharan Africa, parts of South America, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia.
- Have much more uniform economies – Very low wages, tend not to be diverse in their economic makeup.
- Work: raw resource extraction or mostly agricultural and manufacturing.
- ex) Bangladesh: the biggest and most important industry is garments. X has a big financial sector and many monopolies. It's mostly small businesses that ruthlessly compete for capital investment from poor countries.
- ex) Africa: agriculture or raw resource extraction. For the most part they don't have very diversified economies
(3) semi-periphery: countries that both exploit the periphery and are exploited by the core. (victim and perpetrator)
- Purple: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa. (BRICS countries)
- mixed economies. middling wages and developing in the world economy so that they can jump and join on the core, but it’s difficult.
2. 3 Factors of world ranking:
(1) GDP per capita: a measure of the size of a country’s economy according to the monetary value of all goods and services produced in a country in a given year divided by the population size.
- How much $ each person on average in the country produce? = a metric of a country's wealth.
- a high GDP per capita → have higher levels of education for the population → have higher health outcomes → have better infrastructure.
- US GDP/capita = $62,000/person (highest in the world)
- Bangladesh GDP/capita = $2500/person (lowest in the world)
- The core avg. = $50,000/person & the periphery avg. = $10,000/person.
→ Massive inequalities between countries
(2) Billionaires: the wealth concentration
- the world = 2500 billionaires.
- core countries = 1000 billionaires total (60%) (700 of them = United States)
- Semi-perephery = practically almost none or very few in the periphery.
(3) Corporations
- Mapping the global 500: 500 biggest companies in the world.
- giant circles represent 1 company.
- The size of the circle represents how much revenue that company brings in
- core countries have the most with the widest circles
- China is growing with the number of big companies that they have. China is on the rise.
- A wealth measure billionaire and corporate size to show that there is this power relationship between core and periphery.
- Periphery countries are not underdeveloped, they are overexploited by the core through unequal exchange.
[L4] The Multinational Corporation Sep 13, 2023
* Resources: (1) Textbook, “Non-State Actors”, P. 141-146
I. Features
* Multinational Corporation: a business entity that has stock to engage in foreign direct investment.
Background: Before the Dutch's innovation, cargo ships were heavily militarized, Dutch did sth innovation by only carrying cargo. Fluid as a ship design is a technical innovation. VOC: The major first multinational corporations. Pepper, clothes, and so on. Highly profitable and incredibly violence.
1. Business Entity: a set of geographically flexible labor functions that contribute to the production and sale of commodities
(1) For multinational corporations,
EX) NIKE
| 1. Control and Coordination (HQ) | 2. Research and Development |
| NIKE headquarter: Beaverton, OR All major decisions are made in headquarters, lots of responsibilities, legal department, comply with regulatory, financial decision, budget allocation. Geographically very few multinationals. Home country: High skilled-labor, info flow, tech knowledge Location: Core |
Beaverton, OR Shenzen, China R&D happens in home countries, close to headquarters. High skilled-labor, info flow, tech knowledge. |
| 3. Marketing and Sales | 4. Production |
| Nike's revenue worldwide from the fiscal years of 2017 to 2022, by region (in million U.S. dollars) |
Production commodity chain of NIKE shoes |
| North America, Europe, China, Middle East, Africa Geographically disperse. They want to be on the market as close as possible Sensitive to local conditions, respond rapidly to retailers and commodities in real time. Revenue: North America is the largest, but China is getting bigger. |
Turkey, China, India, Thailand, Indonesia Location: Periphery, labor is cheap. Cheapest price for workers. Extract resources Final assembly: China: very good assembling product. Decoupling: US tries to get more corporations, difficult to do that. India x have skill sets right now. |
2. Stock: shares (units of stock) in the ownership of a corporation
(1) Before VOC, people tried to find one individual wealthy person. It’s risky. Single investor lost all that money.
(2) To spread the risk, get profit after share.
EX) FACEBOOK
3. Foreign direct investment (FDI): (the most important aspect) when a corporation in one country makes an investment in a corporate project in another country with a controlling ownership stake over it 회사가 주식을 팔아서 투자를 여러 방면에 많이 함.
| (1) Brownfield FDI | (2) Greenfield FDI |
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II. Strategies
1. The corporate veil of distance: when a manager and/or the shareholders can’t be legally held accountable for the wrongdoings of their corporation's operations in another country
(1) because headquarters are in different place.
For example, Union Carbide Corp had a chemical explosion, a lot of people died. But it utilized this during the Bhopal disaster. The Indian government requested the extradition of a Union Carbide executive to be tried in court for Union Carbide's actions in the Bhopal disaster but since they are in the US the US government simply denied the request and Union Carbide experienced no legal repercussions as a result.
2. Tax Avoidance: the usage of the global tax regime to legally reduce the amount of taxes a multinational corporation owes (illegal)
(1) Tax division is legal.
ex) Starbucks: transferring pricing; open a shop in Iceland → buy and sell at a low prices internally → pretend to pay more tax in Iceland since it has a low tax
그래서 15% cross border tax 가 생겼음. 다른 나라에 팔 때 택스 더 붙이는 것.
(2) The US never agrees to the agreement since they are not interested.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Upae1hjq3Bs
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