Abstract
Ideoscape is a term introduced by Arjun Appadurai (1990) to represent one of the five contemporary global cultural flows that is constitutive of linked images and ideas related to the political discourses of the Enlightenment such as sovereignty, freedom, rights, welfare, representation, and democracy.
Ideoscapes are attempts to capture state power and therefore also consist of counter-ideologies in opposition to modern, dominant political discourses. Appadurai's major goals for developing his five dimensions (ethnoscape, technoscape, financescape, mediascape, and ideoscape) of global cultural economy were to demonstrate that globalization was not merely rooted in the expansion of global capitalism within core–periphery models, or produced a homogenized global culture.
Rather, Appadurai sought to demonstrate how modernity circulates through geographic, diasporic, imaginary, and local spaces to produce irregularities of globalization.
The suffix, scapes, is used to parallel the variable and often uneven terrain of landscapes to that of uneven global modernization.