Globalisation and Local Conflicts in Africa and Asia

Book excerpt: This edited book is written by six authors from Asia and Africa. The individual authors focus on their own country's case or cases that they have been working on. The book features local conflicts in six countries in Asia and Africa and identifies how the local conflicts are affected by the forces of globalization. Cases include Nigeria's oil-related conflicts, the Democratic Republic of Congo's timber conflicts, continuing instability in Mozanbique, Thailand's conflict with regard to AIDS medicine, Myanmar's local conflicts after its reforms, and the Afghanistan’s conflicts over minerals. From these diverse case studies, the book examines how globalization and international politics affect local politics and conflicts, and vice versa. Even seemingly internal conflicts are shown to be significantly influenced by globalization forces and to create new dynamism in local politics. While there are other books that explore globalization and conflicts, many of them are conceptually organized with a small number of case studies. The present volume examines local conflicts in relation to globalization and demonstrates how structural inequality vis-a-vis weak stateness and statehood are significantly affected by global political economy.