Globalization is widely perceived as the defining issue of our times. Exactly what “globalization” means, however, is unclear. Some commentators argue that the world is not necessarily more integrated now than at the turn of the twentieth century (Hirst and Thompson, 1996), whereas others grant globalization only epiphenomenal significance in an era of transition to a postmodern world system future (Wallerstein, 2002:37). Positive definitions can take several forms, in which globalization is viewed as a process, an organizing principle, an outcome, a conjuncture, or a project. As a process, globalization is typically defined, in economic terms, as “the closer integration of the countries and peoples of the world … by the enormous reduction of costs of transportation and communication, and the breaking down of artificial barriers to the flows of goods, services, capital, knowledge, and (to a lesser extent) people across borders” (Stiglitz, 2002:9). As an organizing principle, it can be conceptualized as “deterritorialization” (Scholte, 2000:46), that is, as the explanans in accounting for contemporary social change, as “the ‘lifting out’ of social relations from local contexts of interaction and their restructuring across indefinite spans of time–space” (Giddens, 1990:21). Related to this is the notion of globalization as the compression of time/space (Harvey, 1989; Castells, 1996; Helleiner, 1997), expressed for example in biopolitical disciplines (Hoogvelt, 1997:125). And there is the political angle, emphasizing the global transformation of the conditions of democratic political community, as “effective power is shared and bartered by diverse forces and agencies at national, regional and international levels” (Held, 2000:399), challenging conventional, state-centered accounts of world order.