 Hello everyone, it's a great pleasure to be here with you today on this webinar for the Globalization and Development Master's program at SOS. What I would like to do today is two things basically. I want to first of all give a bit of an overview of the program, the kind of things that we will do, the expectations of students, the activities available to you in this master's course, and then I'm going to finish with a short excerpt from one of our lectures, just looking at some of the themes that we will cover in globalization, in particular, what we mean by the term and some of the ways that we we think about globalization today. So to begin with, I wanted to speak about the themes of GND, Globalization and Development. There are basically four things that we cover in this course. Firstly, we look at theories of globalization. As you will see, there's different ways of understanding the term and its implications over the last few decades. So we engage with all of these theories, reading from texts, discussions in class, trying to understand the underlying assumptions that lie behind the different ways of theorizing globalization today. Secondly, very importantly, connected to these theories are some of the empirical patterns and trends of globalizing processes. So we'll look at a global level around a range of different measures of globalization, looking at how they've changed over the last few decades, looking at the impact of crises on these things and what they might mean for people across the world. Thirdly, very importantly, we look at some of the social, economic and political impacts of globalization. In particular, one of so-called strengths is our focus on countries in the global south. So we'll be discussing in some depth what does globalization mean and what might it mean in the future for poorer countries across the world. And finally, as this is a Development Studies course, we'll look at some of the relations or the connections of globalization to areas such as sociology, ecology, political economy, politics, culture and governance. We're very much an interdisciplinary course. And so we cover all of these and many more things throughout the 20 weeks of the course. So looking now at what's the structure of GND. There are two full year core courses that you need to take to graduate with the GND Masters. First of all, you need to take the core course itself. And in a second, I'll be showing you what the lecture outline for the course was for this year. And then secondly, you take another or you take two more, sorry, you take one of two core courses, either political economy of development or theory, policy and practice of development. These are large courses that students from across a range of degrees will be taking. And they cover, firstly, PED covers issues of political economy. And secondly, TPP covers some of the theories and experiences of development globally over the last period. So you choose one of those core courses and you take your choice in addition to the globalization and development course. So for all of these core courses, there are a one hour lecture and a one hour small group tutorial each week. So they are in total 20 week courses. They run over two terms, 10 weeks each term. And in each week, you'd have two hours of contact time, one hour of a lecture and one hour of a small group tutorial. Normally around 10 people in that tutorial. Finally, or in addition to this, you will take four other term length modules. So these are modules that cover issues in much more depth. You can find a list of these modules available on the Development Studies website on the SOS main site. And finally, very importantly, you will be doing a writing a dissertation in conjunction with a supervisor of 10,000 words. You need to pass this dissertation in order to get your master's degree. And it is up to you the topic that you choose. You discuss this in conjunction with a supervisor. And it's really an opportunity for you to explore in much more depth the topic of interest to you in the course. It has to be in related in some way to the themes of globalization and development. But as you'll see, these themes are very broad. So you will be the options available are quite wide. OK, looking at the course structure or outline for this term. We have, sorry, there seems to be a problem with this slide. Sorry, this slide is not seeming to work, but if I can, I'll just run through some things that we cover in the outline. So we begin with looking at introduction to globalization and development. Then we talk around themes such as empire, imperialism and U.S. hegemony in the second week. Thirdly, we discuss the unipolar moment. In other words, the rise of the United States to global dominance. And we continue this thing in the following lecture where we look at some of the challenges to the U.S. globally. And then the fifth week is a lecture on neoliberalism. So we'll be discussing what is meant by neoliberalism and its impact and relationship to development of globalization. In week six, we look at financialization. And then the rest of the term covers themes such as work and labor, informalization of labor and developing countries, labor migration under globalization and borders in the global economy. In the second term, we look at themes such as gender, how we understand globalization and urbanization, states and global markets, globalization and agrarian change, questions of ecology and extractivism, global labor movements, and then themes around democratization, revolution and rebellion and their connection to globalization. So these are some of the themes. If any of you are interested in looking at this outline in detail, please send me an email and I'll be happy to send you the course outline. You can have a look at the kinds of topics we cover in further depth. Moving on to the assessment that is required for the course. This there are three basic assessment pieces that you are required to to produce over the over the 20 weeks of this term. Firstly, a book review where you choose a book related to the themes of the of the of the course and write a review worth 25 percent of your overall assessment. Secondly, a set of five PowerPoint slides where you take one of the lecture topics from the term and you present the basic debates and ideas behind this lecture topic in a simple PowerPoint slides. And finally, the major piece of assessment is a 2,500 to 3,000 word essay that reaches 45 percent of your overall grade. Looking finally, before I ask you if you have any questions at the some of the other activities of SOAS, one of the great things about being a SOAS is that there is a wide range of other regional and thematic centres that you can become involved in as a student, as well as a number of lecture series that take place each week at the school. So just to give you this, this is a very brief list. There are many more than this, but just to give you an idea of some of these things we have in the developer studies department a week and a series that involves invited guests from the UK and across the world. Presenting on their research and cutting edge topics and debates in developer studies. There's also an agrarian change seminar series, which includes regular lectures on people by people who are working on themes of agrarian development and again looking at experiences in rural sectors across the world. The Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies is a very active centre at SOAS and has a weekly lecture with again speakers invited from around the world that looks at questions of migration, both in the UK and more broadly. And then a number of regional centres and institutes such as the African Studies Centre, South Asian Studies Centre and the London Middle East Institute, which all organise their own lecture series as well. So as you can see, there's a really wide range of activities and we find that students get a lot from these kinds of activities and indeed many say this is some of them, one of the most enriching parts of their time at SOAS. So before I move on to speaking a little bit more about globalisation, I wanted to ask if any of you have any questions I might be able to answer, please just drop down your question in the chat box and I'll try to answer them. If not, I'll move on to looking at what do we mean by this term globalisation and what are some of the ways that it's been understood and theorised over the recent past. The first thing that I want to note is that as we'll see in this course, there is a lot of discussion about whether globalisation is actually a new phenomena or something that has existed for many, many, for many, many years. I have here a quote that I think is quite revealing. Can anyone tell me where this quote might have come from? Capital has to have exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. All old established national industries are dislodged by new industries. These products are consumed not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe in place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency. We have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. Anyone know where this came from? This is actually a quote that was written around 1848. It's a quote that comes from the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels and the Communist Manifesto. And if we look at that quote, we can see what they're describing is something that actually appears to be very relevant to the contemporary world. Marx and Engels didn't use the term globalisation, they called it instead the world market, but they much argued that these kinds of global interconnections were intrinsic to the development of capitalism. In other words, global processes, the pushing beyond national boundaries, the interconnection of the world market as a single unitary space is something that was very much bound up with the beginnings of capitalist development. So using these kinds of assumptions, many people have argued that we actually see rather than a moment of globalisation that begins later in the 80s or 90s, rather waves or cycles of globalisation where the global political economy is more or less integrated through different phases. This is certainly true, but at the same time, we can see over recent years that there has been a very significant of openness and integration of the global economy. We can see this through a number of indicators that look at the way that national boundaries and national units actually are becoming more and more dependent upon their exposure to the global. So just to look at a few of these indicators, here we have long term trends in value and volume of merchandise exports. So this is a graph from UNCTAD, an internal organisation that produces regular reports that measures trends in globalisation. You can see here that from the 1950s to the 1970s, both these things, the value and volume of merchandise exports, were relatively stable. Here we have on the left hand axis, the zero to 250 with the year 2000 marked as 100. We can see in this period that then there is a massive acceleration that takes place beginning in the 1980s, but really increasing from the 1990s onwards in both the value of and the volume of exports of goods coming from countries around the world. This tells us a very important fact. It tells us that countries are becoming much more dependent upon their external exports, their exports to the rest of the world in both the scale as well as the importance of these exports to national economies. This is one measure of globalisation and it's something that we'll look at in some depth as we look at patterns of trade that have emerged over the last two decades. The other interesting thing about this graph that I would like to point out is the drop that we see around 2008, where it's marked boom and global crisis. This was a period of extreme shock, the collapse of 2008 and 2009 and the ramifications of which we are still living with today. This global crisis saw a significant drop in both the volume and value of merchandise exports and we can see it was preceded by a very sharp rise. So we'll look at the causes of this global crisis and what it might mean for how we understand globalisation. Another indicator that also is frequently used when discussing these kinds of things are the cross-border capital flows. So here we have different kinds of cross-border capital flows zooming in on a period of 1980 to 2015. We're looking here at in blue the foreign direct investment, yellow portfolio investments. So this is investments into overseas stock markets and then red banking flows, capital flows. So you can see again mirroring the patterns we saw in the previous graph. There's a very significant increase from the early 1990s up until that moment in 2008 when we see a very significant plunge in these cross-border capital flows. And then in the last few years, somewhat of a pickup, but still much less than what we saw in the early or in the mid 2000s. So again, these are some of the things we'll look at. We'll look at what do these capital flows mean for how countries relate to one another? What does it mean for ownership of companies? What does it mean for the global growth of companies as they expand throughout the world? So it's important. I want to emphasise this globalisation and development course is not an economics course. You're not expected to have a background in economics at all, but it is something we will be discussing as part of our exploration of globalisation. Some of these economic indicators that are typically used to understand these patterns. So how do we understand these trends? This is a very important part of our course. We look at some of the theoretical approaches to understanding these kinds of increased global integration. One of these, and quite a dominant one, is this idea of liberalism or the liberal paradigm, which basically argues that democracy, free markets and the rule of law are the natural tea loss of humanity. In other words, these are the natural end point of humanity, end of history, and that reflects this increasing global integration, reflects this natural end point. Secondly, we'll look at Marxist and world systems approaches, which, as I pointed out earlier, take the position that capitalism has always been global. And that we need to look at very much concretely how capitalism has expanded across the world, looking at colonisation and competition between nations throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. And then, in more recent periods, the kind of destabilisation of the national state. In other words, the importance of the global scale, the world market to these processes. And then finally, we'll look at post-colonial and decolonial critiques. This set of theoretical debates, look at how do we tell the story of the global from a non-eurocentric perspective? How do we understand globalisation processes beyond simply the central European frames of analysis? So, taking these approaches, we look at themes related to borders, related to migration, ecology, finance, culture, labour, democracy. We take up debates around whether this is a US-led process or, very importantly, whether we're seeing the resurgence of new great power rivalries. In particular, we can see these debates unfold today with the schisms and the tensions between the United States and China, as well as other powers on the global scale. And then finally, we'll very much engage with the question of whether we're seeing actually the end of globalisation, the return of xenophobia, populism and the rise of far-right movements and governments globally. So, this kind of comprehensive account is what you'll get from the globalisation and development degree, integrating these more theoretical questions with very topical debates about politics, about economics and about our world today. Please feel free to drop me an email. If you have any queries about the degree program or about SOAS in general, I'll do my best to answer. It's been a real pleasure and I hope to see you next term in the GND program. Thank you very much.