Walden Bello
Walden Bello is the co-founder and current senior analyst of the Bangkok-based Focus on the Global South and the International Adjunct Professor of Sociology at the State University of New York at Binghamton. He received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize, in 2003, and was named Outstanding Public Scholar of the International Studies Association in 2008.
Articles by this author
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Views Wednesday, November 11, 2020 Things May Get Worse Before They Get Better for the U.S. I’m one of those kibitzers who supported Joe Biden reluctantly from a distance, mainly because I felt that for both the U.S. and the world, he was the lesser evil. And like many, I breathed a sigh of relief when Biden crossed the 270 electoral vote marker. Then the political sociologist in me took... Read more |
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Views Sunday, September 20, 2020 The Death of Neoliberalism In response to the cataclysm occasioned by the coronavirus, three lines of thinking are emerging, corresponding to three GTI scenarios : Market Forces, Policy Reform, and Great Transition. The level of discontent and alienation with neoliberalism was already very high in the Global North before the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, July 07, 2020 The Racist Underpinnings of the American Way of War The U.S. military command’s pushback against President Donald Trump’s attempt to use the military against people demanding racial justice has received a lot of good press. But let’s not overdo the praise. For most of their existence, the U.S. Armed Forces were racially segregated. It was only in... Read more |
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Views Saturday, May 16, 2020 The Race to Replace a Dying Neoliberalism In response to the cataclysm occasioned by the coronavirus, three lines of thinking are emerging. One is that the emergency necessitates extraordinary measures, but the basic structure of production and consumption is sound, and the problem lies only in determining the moment when things can return... Read more |
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Views Sunday, April 26, 2020 The Corporate Food System Is Making the Coronavirus Crisis Worse The global food system has been very much front and center in the COVID-19 story. Everyone, of course, is aware that hunger is closely tracking the virus as its wreaks havoc in both the global North and global South. Indeed, one can say that, unlike in East Asia, Europe, and the U.S., in South Asia... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 24, 2020 Coronavirus and the Death of 'Connectivity' The Covid 19 pandemic is the second major crisis of globalization in a decade. The first was the global financial crisis of 2008-2009, from which the global economy took years to reach a semblance of recovery. We did not learn our lessons from the first, and this is perhaps why the impact of the... Read more |
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Views Friday, December 20, 2019 Good Riddance to the WTO The World Trade Organization (WTO) is on its last legs now that the Trump administration has blocked the appointment or reappointment of judges to the appeals court of its Dispute Settlement Mechanism — which is the central pillar of the 24-year-old multilateral body. Do I regret the demise of the... Read more |
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Views Friday, December 06, 2019 How the Battle of Seattle Made the Truth About Globalization True The Battle of Seattle in late November 1999 is, for me, memorable in many ways. For one, I still remember being given a good beating by a policewoman when I tried to prevent her buddies from hauling off the irrepressible Medea Benjamin, then the director of Global Exchange, from a sit-in at the... Read more |
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Views Tuesday, March 12, 2019 Why Free Trade Is Bad for You (or Most of You at Any Rate) Walden Bello was invited by The Economist to debate the chief economist of the World Trade Organization, Robert Koopman, at the Asia Trade Summit in Hong Kong, on February 28. Billed as the “Great Trade Debate” in an era of rising anti-free trade sentiment, the Oxford-style 20 minute debate took... Read more |
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Views Friday, July 21, 2017 It’s Not Only Necessary to Develop an Alternative to Globalization — It’s Entirely Possible Free trade and the freedom of capital to move across borders have been the cutting edge of globalization. They’ve also led to the succession of crises that have led to the widespread questioning of capitalism as a way of organizing economic life — and of its paramount ideological expression,... Read more |