Unsettling subjectivity across local, national, and global imaginaries : producing an unhappy consciousness

This article analyzes the complex and subtle dynamics involved in producing and representing the global-local nexus in everyday life. Its socio-historical context is the destabilization of the current globalization system – and its associated global imaginary – marked by the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, continuing with the populist explosion in the mid 2010s, and climaxing in the 2020 Global Coronavirus Pandemic. But rather than mischaracterizing the current context as “deglobalization”, we describe it as a contemporary intensification of what we have been calling the “Great Unsettling”. This era of intensifying objective instability is linked to foundational subjective processes. In particular, we examine the production of an “unhappy consciousness” torn between the enjoyment of global digital mobility and the visceral attachment to the familiar limits of local everyday life. In doing so, we rewrite the approach to the sources of ontological security and insecurity

Political ideologies and social imaginaries in the global age

This article argues that proliferation of prefixes like ‘neo’ and ‘post’ that adorn conventional ‘isms’ have cast a long shadow on the contemporary relevance of traditional political ideologies. Suggesting that there is, indeed, something new about today’s political belief systems, the essay draws on the concept of ‘social imaginaries’ to make sense of the changing nature of the contemporary ideological landscape. The core thesis presented here is that today’s ideologies are increasingly translating the rising global imaginary into competing political programs and agendas. But these subjective dynamics of denationalization at the heart of globalization have not yet dispensed with the declining national imaginary. The twenty-first century promises to be an ideational interregnum in which both the global and national stimulate people’s deep-seated understandings of community. Suggesting a new classification scheme dividing contemporary political ideologies into ‘market globalism’, ‘justice globalism’, and ‘jihadist globalism’, the article ends with a brief assessment of the main ideological features of justice globalism

Globalisation and Social Imaginaries: The Changing Ideological Landscape of the Twenty-First Century

The proliferation of prefixes like ‘neo’ and ‘post’ that adorn conventional ‘isms’ has cast a long shadow on the contemporary relevance of traditional political belief systems like liberalism, conservatism, and Marxism. This article explores how the thickening of global consciousness finds its expression in the growing capability of today’s political ideologies to translate the rising global imaginary into concrete political programs and agendas. But these subjective dynamics of denationalization at the heart of globalisation have not yet dispensed with the declining national imaginary. The twenty-first century promises to be an ideational interregnum in which both the global and national stimulate people’s deep-seated understandings of community. The essay also offers a rough outline and basic features of a new classification scheme that divides contemporary political ideologies into ‘market globalism’, ‘justice globalism’, and ‘religious globalism’

Globalisms : the great ideological struggle of the twenty-first century, 3rd ed./ Steger

xii, p. 223; 23 c