These initial qualifications to the ‘shrinking world’ concept expose some
of the weaknesses of ‘geography is dead’ arguments. Contemporary
research in human geography and some other social sciences points
towards the differentiating impacts of ‘global’ processes as they
interact with ‘local’ places, institutions and people. It is indeed true
that the world’s economies and cultures are increasingly interconnected,
and that ‘global’ forces are penetrating even the most remote and
peripheral regions and localities on Earth. However, as such processes
are articulated and resisted in specific places, complete with particular
histories, societies and environments, they create more uneven
geographies. These geographies of globalization, although increasingly
dynamic, sometimes transient and therefore harder to grasp, are none the
less significant, and have real social, economic and political implications.
Underpinning this book is the proposition that understanding
globalization, and attempting to regulate and reform it, requires that
geography be taken more seriously.