Introduction: Global Economic Crisis and the Politics of Diversity

The current global economic crisis has led countries in Europe and the United States to adopt various austerity measures, following an initial emergency policy response of monetary and fiscal stimuli and a series of government bailouts of banks and other financial institutions (Boyer 2012; Callinicos 2012; King et al. 2012). However, this is not a general trend in the global economy, as there is great variation among countries in terms of the impact of the crisis and policy responses to it. While economic growth in Canada, for example, has been slow, many countries from the global South continue to experience higher levels of economic growth. These divergent patterns and context-bound particularities require critical reflection in regard to the intensification of a market-oriented path of development and the tensions and uncertainties associated with an increasingly precarious mode of living for many in the world. This book analyses the deep structural issues, fundamental ontological insecurities, and ecological consequences that express uneven processes in the global proliferation of a market model. The authors in this collection concretize these processes across geographically varied contextual conditions, yet do so within the general global conjuncture of the economic crisis.