In The News

Romancing the Globe

Ibsen Martinez November 1, 2005
Approximately 2 billion people around the world tune in on a regular basis to watch Latin American soap operas known as “telenovelas.” While Hollywood and the US television industry are often seen as the defining forces of cultural globalization, the success of telenovelas is a global phenomenon that is being celebrated as “reverse cultural imperialism.” The plotlines of telenovelas usually...

Sarkozy Pledges Police Crackdown after Riots in Paris

Jon Henley November 1, 2005
Following four nights of violent rioting in the Parisian suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy vowed to aggressively police many of the nation’s poorer, largely immigrant ghettoes. The unrest – the likes of which France has not seen in years – began on Thursday when two boys of North African origin, named only as Ziad, 17, and Banou, 15, died of electrocution after...

International Migration: Brain Drain or Brain Gain?

Caglar Ozden October 31, 2005
The surge in globalization since the end of World War II has been fueled chiefly by an international exchange of goods and capital rather than people. There are signs, however, that international migrants are playing an increasingly important role in globalization as the world enters the twenty-first century. What are the costs and benefits of this new wave of migration? The principal cost of...

Attracting the Adults

Hicham Safieddine October 28, 2005
As the threat of terrorism, too often conflated with Islam itself, continues to dominate Western consciousness, it is instructive to note instances in which US, and Arab culture overlap. One such instance is the Arab television network MBC’s plan to popularize the classic US cartoon The Simpsons in Egypt. The idea of marketing The Simpsons to an Egyptian audience presupposes a certain shared...

China Spending Billions to Better Universities

Howard W. French October 27, 2005
In its latest bid to rise to great power status, China is spending billions of dollars to transform its universities by wooing top scholars and building cutting-edge research facilities. Yet despite China's astounding expansion of education – the number of undergraduates and PhDs in China has increased fivefold in the past decade – many educators lament the dearth of academic debate in...

Toward a Virtual Caliphate

Peter Mandaville October 27, 2005
What does globalization mean for the politics of authority in the Islamic world? Talk of transnational Islamic movements challenging the status quo of Muslim nation-states often brings to mind the destructive extremism of al-Qaida. Peter Mandaville, however, reports that transnational networks of religious scholars – led by figures such as Qatar-based Yusuf al-Qaradawi – have sought in recent...

Vers l’etablissement d’un Califat virtuel?

Peter Mandaville October 27, 2005