Tumultuous Politics of Scale

Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulentstruggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seenas opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground upor representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale atwhich authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporationsredefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movementsbuild alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injusticesare perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book,consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and culturalstudies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal andspatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundariesand political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugeesare disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addressesthe shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical momentsand the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. PartIII, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on“Brexit” and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in EasternEurope that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales ofmovements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development,and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthandnineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles oflabor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development.Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements areconstrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in theireff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.