Globalization and Belonging: The Politics of Identity in a Changing World [Paperback]

Is achieving a sense of personal belonging stymied by the dynamics of globalization?Before we leap to a simplistic answer, Sheila Croucher makes us pause. She shows us here how to closely observe gendered, ethnicized local and global politics in daily interaction. In this era of refugees, Dreamers, fearmongers, nationalists and human rights activists, we need this thoughtful book.Full of contemporary world events exemplary of unprecedented interconnections and violent divisions and exclusions, this latest examination of the relationship between globalization and belonging navigates the paradoxes of simultaneous dilutions and resurgences of identity politics in a globalizing world. It attests to the persistence and reconfigurations of national, racial, ethnic, and gender attachments and inequalities despite and because of globalization in highly engaging, accessible, and complex ways.Globalizations populist critics fail to appreciate that the horse has left the barn.? As Sheila Crouchers splendid bookat once sophisticated and accessiblemakes clear, globalization has transformed and will continue to transform every facet of social life.? The authors focus on its implications for political identities is full of profound insights, as is her analysis of its dark side. Readers will come away with ideas about how we might tame this runaway horse.At a moment when pundits, politicians and scholars alike proclaim the end of the world as we once knew it, Croucher argues in crisp prose that something more complex and less sensationalist is afoot.?Explaining that neither social identity nor class revenge is the primary culprit of rising populism and its discontents, Croucher convincingly demonstrates that new forms of interconnectedness are shaping social identity and class to forge destabilizing shifts such as Brexit, while also consolidating established institutions like the nation-state. A compelling introduction to the deep contradictions of our contemporary moment thatlӟ