The Tumultuous Politics of Scale

Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent

struggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seen

as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up

or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at

which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations

redefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movements

build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices

are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book,

consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural

studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and

spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.

Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries

and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees

are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addresses

the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical moments

and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part

III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on

“Brexit” and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern

Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of

movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development,

and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthand

nineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles of

labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development.

Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are

constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their

eff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.