Geography Reference
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simultaneously “from above,” i.e., by the growing power of transnational
public and private institutions, as well as those working “from below,” that is,
regional authorities and local movements seeking to attract foreign capital or
participate in global processes by bypassing their respective national states
(Anderson 1996). This transformation makes the simple di
erence between
“inside” and “outside” increasingly problematic, rendering borders ever more
porous. Numerous observers have suggested that the postmodern world order
is becoming “unbundled” or “plurilateral” (e.g., Gilpin 1987; Krasner 1991;
Cerny 1993; Ruggie 1993; Elkins 1995), that is to say, it is being displaced by a
new territorial con
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guration that does not take the nation-state as its point of
departure. In some respects, the unbundling of territorial sovereignty induced
by postmodern time-space compression represents a return to medieval struc-
tures of territoriality, in which the boundaries between the internal and
external were messy and ill-de
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ned. While globalization clearly undermines
the ahistorical rei
fixed, eternal entities, it does not
automatically spell the death of this institution either. Many functions and
institutions (e.g., control of immigration, political parties), for example,
remain resolutely entrenched at the national scale.
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cation of nation-states as
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Everyday life under postmodern time-space compression
For billions of people, contending with postmodern time-space compression
has been a di
cult and challenging process. With globalization, “the local
fabric of everyday life is everywhere shot through with the implications of
distant events” (Gregory 1994:121). Everyday life—the domain in which mul-
tiple spatial scales and networks converge around the mundane experiences
and routines of the individual—varies so much among di
erent social groups
that any attempt to generalize about this phenomenon is hazardous to the
point of inevitable failure. That said, for large numbers of people living in
economically developed countries, and even many in the developing world,
postmodern time-space compression takes on distinct contours. Under post-
modern capitalism, everyday life has acquired a global level of extensibility
that is historically unprecedented:
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In conditions of late modernity, we live “in the world” in a di
erent sense
from previous eras of history. Everyone still continues to lead a local life,
and the constraints of the body ensure that all individuals, at every
moment, are contextually situated in time and space. Yet the transform-
ations of place, and the intrusion of distance into local activities, com-
bined with the centrality of mediated experience, radically change what
“the world” actually is. This is so both on the level of the “phenomenal
world” of the individual and the general universe of social activity within
which collective social life is enacted. Although everyone lives a local life,
phenomenal worlds for the most part are truly global.
(Giddens 1991:187)
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