Organizer: Anshu Chatterjee, Naval Postgraduate School

Chair: Dwight Dyer, University of California, Berkeley

Discussants: Mark E Koops, University of California, Berkeley; Dwight Dyer, University of California, Berkeley

The panel brings together papers that address unexpected contradictions stemming from the promotion of global commercial integration that has highlighted community interaction on one hand and security concerns surrounding religious militancy on the other. In this global setting, states, in their quest to maintain security in the face of increasing transnational terrorism, are not the only players who face unexpected constraints on their powers. Transnational corporations also confront the limitations of operating in differentiated cultural and political contexts. For transnational media, as illustrated by one of the papers, audience reception of information is embedded in the local political and cultural setting which at times is unpredictable. Another paper demonstrates that outsourcing aspects of the trade also produce unexpected community responses. Together these papers provide stories that portray different consequences of the same global setting that allow expansion of trade and cooperation, yet at the same time produces new challenges to the state as well as the commercial sector.

Anshu Chatterjee, Naval Postgraduate School

Newsweek’s story regarding a report on desecration of Koran in Guantanamo Bay that initiated violent riots in South Asia as well as debates about media’s role and responsibility during wartime may have contributed to increasing tensions across the world. Yet, the story remains incomplete without an examination of restructuring that has occurred in the media sector at the global level; a process that has not only transformed media operations in South Asia but provides a new challenge of producing news for various political contexts simultaneously. These varied contexts present a dilemma for transnational media companies that expected to dominate these underdeveloped media markets in the liberalized commercial setting. This paper will examine the operations of global media in the cultural and political markets that shape consumption of news in South Asia. How then is this information used to mobilize communities for unexpected use in local political struggles will also be presented.

Karthika Sasikumar, Cornell University

In the aftermath of the 2001 attacks on the United States, thousands of individuals were swept up by the long arm of the law. Two of these were Muslim men from the city of Hyderabad in South India, Mohammed Azmath and Syed Shah, who were accused by American authorities of being linked to the 9/11 terrorists. Azmath and Shah were finally released and deported in 2003 after having served time for credit card fraud. During this time, Indian authorities also tried to deport Azmath’s wife, who was revealed to be a Pakistani citizen who had overstayed her visa in India. This story is a microcosm of the intersections of nationalism and globalization, overlaid with new concerns about terrorism and religious militancy. The contradictions between ethnicity and citizenship are played out both in the US and in India as both these multicultural states struggle to redefine themselves in the face of concerns about Islamic fundamentalism. Using the story of two individuals, this paper shows how immigration complicates the security calculations of states, focuses their fears, and demonstrates the limits and extent of their power in an age of globalization.

Caroline E. Arnold, University of California, Berkeley

New globalized practices, from call centers to other forms of international sourcing, have eroded the previous distinction between tradeables and non-tradeables that was fundamental to traditional political economic analysis that viewed the territory of the national states as sovereign. This increasing diversity of linkages between local industries and international actors has opened up a variety of questions about new geographies of production, their consequences for local identities, and the meaning of territory itself. This paper uses case studies of the information technology sector in Bangalore and the garments industry in Tiruppur to explore the intersection of marketing strategies, discourses of local identities, and local production processes. In so doing it highlights the contradictory and often conflictive nature of the relationship between the role played by "labor" in the production of internationally consumed goods and the local and international rhetoric surrounding their production. In also addresses the tensions and implications of international marketing strategies for local identities, industrial success, and the way that globalized production is manifested on the ground.