Book review-D. Schneiderman, Resisting Economic Globalization: Critical Theory and International Investment Law, Series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies, Palgrave Macmillan, Hampshire

摘要

This book questions whether economic globalization is irresistible or irreversible given the hindsight that at times economic globalization has detrimental impact on the lives and livelihoods of the larger populations of the world. It focuses on the ensemble of rules and institutions associated with economic globalization known popularly as the 'investment rules regime' which impedes the acts of resistance at various locales in the world. The author points out that the agenda of neoliberalism has not only been economic but also social and cultural in its doctrines and programs to insulate the market from politics and in the active constitution of subjectivities like the consumer citizen and shareholder democracy. The stated objective of the book is to inquire into the ways and means by which citizens and states may be able to undo some of the constraints of transnational legality. The book emphasizes that that states are critical to the maintenance and legitimacy of transnational legality and so remain salient locales for resistance. States are active players in the structuration of economic globalization. They play multiple and even contradictory roles as home and host state to global business interests, regulator, enforcer of contracts and property rights. The book makes a case for centering the state in the resistance against subsumption of everything under the neo-liberal logic of the market. This argument is premised upon the central role of states both in binding governments and citizens to transnational legal structures and in the unique legal capacity of states to undo those constraints and serve as a salient locale with which to engage in critical resistance