Globalization, the State and Violence

Rating:
Summary: overwritten academic gibberish with no point
Review: I am working on a doctoral dissertation on the relationship between worldwide trends in violence and economic markets. I purchased this book because the title led me to believe that within its covers might be found some useful information on this topic. With a title like Globalization, the State, and Violence, one might think that the book might provide some insights into globalization, "the state," or violence. However, a reader needs to work very hard to draw anything from this book worth citing.

Granted, the book is a collection of essays by different authors, so no single statement can summarize all of them. However, I found the entire collection devoid of any important knowledge or fresh insights. Collections of this type are in one sense the voice of their editor, and thus the editor of this horridly boring collection of articles must shoulder the blame.

Here is an example of the kind of writing found in this book:

"Finally, violence connected with issues of identity, which claims to have a religious or ethnic signification, may be an expression of the failure or the inadequacies of political projects conceived of in the more classical categories of modernity, beginning with those that prioritize either the all-embracing social class and proletarian revolution or else that of the nation and the nation-state" (page 133).

Imagine reading hundreds of sentences like this and you can imagine what I felt like after subjecting myself to this wretched collection of writings. Utterly meaningless, leftist, fake-intellectual, so-called "scholarly" nonsense. The book left me feeling angry and used. I can't believe I spent actual money on such gibberish.