anne's dispatches from sydney

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Last Friday, I gave a presentation in class on the topic of "globalisation", and making ethical judgements in regards to the manifestations of these policies. I saw my task as to clarify the controversies that have been bundled together under this vague word- to restore its political meaning. [Luckily I did not have to clarify "No. the issue is not the amount of phone calls around the world..."]

I was quite surprised at how traumatised I felt in researching this old topic of mine again. Reading articles on the internet often made me cry my eyes out. Also, the responsibility of educating fellow class mates made me feel like a bearer of bad news. But I did it, and people responded well, saying they had learnt a lot.

Perhaps I found it so hard because for the first time, I was judging institutions and policies relative to positive ideals of achieving human potential- whereas before, I would educate people about the WTO, whilst taking a cynical world view for granted. My task made the ethical frameworks redundant- because the WTO and WB/IMF policies didn't just 'not measure up' to standards but are counterproductive in an absolute sense.

I divided the controversies into two main parts, that I called 'vectors'.

1. Structural Adjustment Programs of the World Bank and IMF since 1980
2. International trade agreements since 1994.

posted by: anneinchaosland at 17:44 | link | comments |

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