Post-Globalization Challenging Democracies

Globalization promising structural homogeneity and cultural uniformity is over and the turn to post-globalization becomes the newest challenge to sociology. Post-globalization is a set of tendencies towards: 1) localization of globality in networked super-urban enclaves where flows of things, symbols, and humans made social life really global – open, borderless, mobile, multicultural, 2) widening economic and social gaps between enclaves of globality and surrounding towns and rural areas, 3) rising new barriers (trade wars, sanctions, anti-migrant walls, quarantines, military confrontations etc.) to restrict transnational networks and flows.

Post-globalization is challenging both liberal democracy as a dominant paradigm of recent decades and authoritarian populism exploiting democratic procedures to mobilize the demos against individual rights and liberties. Recently emerging barriers, varying from Trump and Orban’s anti-migrant walls to restrictions motivated by struggle against COVID-19 and by counteraction to Russian invasion of Ukraine, are shrinking transnational networks and flows of people, things, energy, and information.

This regular session welcomes papers discussing challenges to democracy in context of the neoliberal globalization crisis and focusing on such questions:

What is social and political meaning of post-globalization?

How do new disparities and inequalities redefine social and political agenda in post-globalization context?

What are social and political consequences of barriers restricting transnational networks and flows?

What are the causes of electoral successes of anti-globalist and anti-liberal populism opposed to an inclusive democracy promoting diversity and rights of minorities and migrants but based on rules of traditional democracy (the majority power and governance legitimated by popular vote)?