The political economies of different globalizations : theorizing reglobalization

Globalization remains contested, and often misunderstood, with damaging real-world consequences. We make four interlinked contentions in this regard. First, globalization is here to stay: although critics might wish it away intellectually, and populists might attempt this practically, the scale of contemporary global integration renders these aims implausible and even undesirable. Second, by viewing neoliberal globalization as a distinct variant rooted in a particular time and place and born of a particular constellation of contingent social and political forces, we can conceive of, and ultimately construct, ‘different globalizations'. Third, emergent forms of both right- and left-wing ‘deglobalization' do not provide meaningful routes out of the crisis of a decaying neoliberalism. Fourth, only a repurposed form of ‘re-embedded post-neoliberal reglobalization’ can deliver this. By conceptualizing the challenge in these terms, we provide the theoretical underpinnings for the special issue which addresses the potential for reglobalization in practice across the global political economy.