Globalization

• Daniel Jaffee
• University of California Press, 2007
• Paperback, 331
• 9780520249592

Fair trade is a fast-growing alternative market intended to bring better prices and greater social justice to small farmers around the world. But is it working? This vivid study of coffee farmers in Mexico offers the first thorough investigation of the social, economic, and environmental benefits of fair trade. Based on extensive research in Zapotec indigenous communities in the state of Oaxaca, Brewing Justice follows the members of the cooperative Michiza, whose organic coffee is sold on the international fair trade market. It compares these families to conventional farming families in the same region, who depend on local middlemen and are vulnerable to the fluctuations of the world coffee market. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book carries readers into the lives of these coffee producer households and their communities, offering a nuanced analysis of both the effects of fair trade on everyday life and the limits of its impact. Brewing Justice paints a clear picture of the complex dynamics of the fair trade market and its relationship to the global economy. Drawing on interviews with dozens of fair trade leaders, the book also explores the changing politics of this international movement, including the challenges posed by the entry of transnational corporations into the fair trade system. It concludes by offering recommendations for strengthening and protecting the integrity of fair trade.

• Daniel J. Walkowitz & Lisa Maya Knauer (Eds.)
• Duke UP, 2009
• Paperback, 365 pages
• 9780822342366

Contested Histories in Public Space brings multiple perspectives to bear on historical narratives presented to the public in museums, monuments, texts, and festivals around the world, from Paris to Kathmandu, from the Mexican state of Oaxaca to the waterfront of Wellington, New Zealand. Paying particular attention to how race and empire are implicated in the creation and display of national narratives, the contributing historians, anthropologists, and other scholars delve into representations of contested histories at such “sites” as a British Library exhibition on the East India Company, a Rio de Janeiro shantytown known as “the cradle of samba,” the Ellis Island immigration museum, and high-school history textbooks in Ecuador.

• Henry J. Frundt
• University of Arizona Press, 2009
• Paperback, 273 pages
• ISBN: 9780816528363

Bananas are the most-consumed fruit in the world. In the United States alone, the public eats about twenty-eight pounds of bananas per person every year. The total value of the international banana trade is nearly five billion dollars annually, with 80 percent of all exported bananas originating in Latin America. There are as many as ten million people involved in growing, packing, and shipping bananas, but American consumers have only recently begun to think about them and about their working conditions. Although European nations have helped create a “fair trade” system for bananas grown in Mediterranean and Caribbean regions, the United States as a country has not developed a similar system for bananas grown in Latin America, where large corporations have dominated trade for more than a century. <br><br>Fair Bananas! is one of the first books to examine the issue of “fair-trade bananas.” Specifically, Henry Frundt analyzes whether a farmer-worker-consumer alliance can collaborate to promote a fair-trade label for bananas—much like those for fair-trade coffee and chocolate—that will appeal to North American shoppers. Researching the issue for more than ten years, Henry Frundt has elicited surprising and nuanced insights from banana workers, Latin American labor officials, company representatives, and fair-trade advocates.

• Nick Dyer-Witheford & Greig de Peuter
• Minnesota UP, 2009
• Paperback, 298 pages
• 9780816666119

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, video games are an integral part of global media culture, rivaling Hollywood in revenue and influence. No longer confined to a subculture of adolescent males, video games today are played by adults around the world. At the same time, video games have become major sites of corporate exploitation and military recruitment.

In Games of Empire, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter offer a radical political critique of such video games and virtual environments as Second Life, World of Warcraft, and Grand Theft Auto, analyzing them as the exemplary media of Empire, the twenty-first-century hypercapitalist complex theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The authors trace the ascent of virtual gaming, assess its impact on creators and players alike, and delineate the relationships between games and reality, body and avatar, screen and street.

• Vincenzo Pietropaolo
• Between the Lines; 2009
• Paperback; 144 pages
• 9781897071540

Like migratory birds, most of Canada's 20,000 "guest" farm workers arrive in the spring and leave in the autumn. Hailing primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and smaller countries of the Caribbean, these temporary workers have become entrenched in the Canadian labour force and are the mainstay of many traditional family farms in Canada. Many of them make the trip year after year after year.

Vincenzo Pietropaolo has been photographing guest workers and recording their stories since 1984 - in the process travelling to forty locations throughout Ontario and to their homes in Mexico, Jamaica, and Montserrat. The resulting photographs have been highly acclaimed internationally through many publications and exhibitions, including a travelling show curated by the Canadian Museum of Contemporary Photography that opened in Mexico City.

With a foreword by Naomi Rosenblum, this beautiful and timely book of photography and exposition aims to shed light on a subject about which many Canadians know all too little.


Vincenzo Pietropaolo is an award-winning photographer whose work has been widely published in Canada and abroad. An Italian-Canadian, he and his family immigrated to Canada in 1959. He is the author of Celebration of Resistance: Ontario's Days of Action (1999) and Not Paved with Gold: Italian-Canadian Immigrants in the 1970s (2006).

• David Lyon
• Polity Press, 2009
• Paperback, 208 pages
• 9780745641560

New ID card systems are proliferating around the world. These may use digitized fingerprints or photos, may be contactless, using a scanner, and above all, may rely on computerized registries of personal information. In this timely new contribution, David Lyon argues that such IDs represent a fresh phase in the long-term attempts of modern states to find stable ways of identifying citizens. 

New ID systems are "new" because they are high-tech. But their newness is also seen crucially in the ways that they contribute to new means of governance. The rise of e-Government and global mobility along with the aftermath of 9/11 and fears of identity theft are propelling the trend towards new ID systems. This is further lubricated by high technology companies seeking lucrative procurements, giving stakes in identification practices to agencies additional to nation-states, particularly technical and commercial ones. While the claims made for new IDs focus on security, efficiency and convenience, each proposal is also controversial. Fears of privacy-loss, limits to liberty, government control, and even of totalitarian tendencies are expressed by critics. 

• Donald Gutstein
• Key Porter Books, 2009
• Paperback, 376 pages
• 9781554701919

North Americans have expressed themselves loud and clear on a wide range of issues--like the need for expanded and affordable health care—but it often feels like the politicians in power aren’t really listening.   The truth is, maybe they aren’t.   In Not a Conspiracy Theory, Donald Gutstein skillfully documents one of the most important but least recognized political developments in the last thirty years: the prolonged propaganda campaigns mounted by business to change our minds on fundamental issues of social life.   He explores such topics as the Propaganda Century; American Roots: The Rise of the Corporate Propaganda System; The Propoganda Machine in Action: The '90s and Beyond; Delaying Action on Climate Change: Killing Medicare … to save it? and, Targeting Corporate Propaganda’s Vulnerabilities.   

• Alissa Hamilton
• Yale UP, 2009
• Hardcover, 247 pages
• ISBN: 9780300124712

Close to three quarters of U.S. households buy orange juice. Its popularity crosses class, cultural, racial, and regional divides. Why do so many of us drink orange juice? How did it turn from a luxury into a staple in just a few years? More important, how is it that we don’t know the real reasons behind OJ’s popularity or understand the processes by which the juice is produced?

In this enlightening book, Alissa Hamilton explores the hidden history of orange juice. She looks at the early forces that propelled orange juice to prominence, including a surplus of oranges that plagued Florida during most of the twentieth century and the army’s need to provide vitamin C to troops overseas during World War II. She tells the stories of the FDA’s decision in the early 1960s to standardize orange juice, and the juice equivalent of the cola wars that followed between Coca-Cola (which owns Minute Maid) and Pepsi (which owns Tropicana). Of particular interest to OJ drinkers will be the revelation that most orange juice comes from Brazil, not Florida, and that even “not from concentrate” orange juice is heated, stripped of flavor, stored for up to a year, and then reflavored before it is packaged and sold. The book concludes with a thought-provoking discussion of why consumers have the right to know how their food is produced.

Alissa Hamilton is a Woodcock Foundation Food and Society Policy Fellow. She lives in Toronto.

• Raj Patel
• Harper Collins; March 2008
• Hardcover; 448 pages
• 9780002008112

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

• Nelson Ross Laguna
• Exile Press (Ottawa), 2009
• Paperback, 81 pages

Most of us never stop to think about the footprints we leave after we have left the areas we claim to explore. Our attempts at helping the global south with tourist dollars is another attempt to have white man's privilege save the poor from becoming poorer, all the while reinforcing racist stereotypes and the histories of slavery on a continuing path of imperialism. In our attempts to invent our own little paradise in someone else's backyard, we have created a system that bears a striking resemblance to the one we were determined to destroy.

Sun, Fun & Slavery is a short exploration of this phenomenon, with a focus on the intersection between modern-day tourism and terrorism.

• Stephen Baranyi (Ed.)
• UBC Press, 2008
• Paperback, 358 pages
• 9780774814522

What kind of peace is possible in the post-9/11 world? Is sustainable peace an illusion in a world where foreign military interventions are replacing peace negotiations as starting points for postwar reconstruction? What would it take to achieve durable peace in contexts as different as Afghanistan, Mozambique, and Sri Lanka? Grappling with these questions, this book presents six provocative case studies authored by respected peacebuilding practitioners in their own societies. The studies address two cases of relative success (Guatemala and Mozambique), three cases of renewed but deeply fraught efforts (Afghanistan, Haiti, and the Palestinian Territories), and the case of Sri Lanka, where peacebuilding was aborted but where the outlines of a new peace process can be discerned. The book also includes original analyses of demobilization, disarmament, and reintegration processes. It will interest practitioners and students of peace, security, and development studies, as well as policymakers at many levels of government.

Stephen Baranyi is Principal Researcher on Conflict Prevention at the North-South Institute in Ottawa.

• Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
• Harper Perennial; 2005
• Paperback; 368 pages
• 9780006394914

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (1-2 weeks).

With the popularity of Michael Moore, Adbusters magazine and Naomi Klein’s No Logo, it’s hard to ignore the growing tide of resistance to our corporatecontrolled world. But do these vocal opponents of the status quo offer us a real political alternative?

In this lively blend of pop culture, history and philosophical analysis, Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter argue that this countercultural opposition to "the system" has not only been unproductive but has helped to create the very consumer society that radicals oppose. This thought-provoking book will enrage and entertain today’s countercultural rebels and their opponents on the political right.

• Jeb Brugman
• Viking Canada, 2009
• Hardcover, 342 pages
• ISBN: 9780670068050

This book is not currently in stock, but is available to order (2-4 weeks).

Welcome to the Urban Revolution, internationally recognized urbanist Jeb Brugmann turns traditional thinking about globalization on its head to show that the city isn't a backdrop to global change; it is a central <i>driver</i> of change- political, economic, social, and environmental. This powerful reappraisal of the global role of cities brilliantly synthesizes urban studies, economics, and sociology to show how cities create but can also help solve some of the 21st century's major challenges, including poverty, inequality, and environmental sustainability.

Jeb Brugmann has developed strategies in over 50 countries to address the needs of cities and their roles in global change. He is a faculty member of the Cambridge University Programme for Industry and lives in Toronto.