Globalizations

December 2006, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 441 – 448

Cultural Conflicts, Fundamentalisms, and Globalization

HABIBUL HAQUE KHONDKER

Let me begin my discussion with two newspaper reports spanning a year and two cultural zones.
‘50,000 virgins audition to join a king’s harem’ was the caption of a story in The Washington Times
filed by Rebecca Harrison. Datelined Ludzidzini Royal Village, Swaziland, the story reported:

More than 50,000 bare-breasted virgins vied to become the King of Swaziland’s 13th wife yesterday
in a ceremony which critics say ill befits a country with the world’s highest HIV/Aids rate. King
Mswati III, sub-Saharan Africa’s last absolute monarch, arrived dressed in a leopard-skin loincloth
to watch the Reed Dance ceremony, which he has used since 1999 to pluck new brides from the girls
dressed in little more than beaded mini-skirts. . . . the girls danced around the royal stadium in the
hope of catching the eye of the 37-year-old monarch.
‘I want to live a nice life, have money, be rich, have a BMW and cellphone,’ said one dancer,
16-year-old Zodwa Mamba, who wore a traditional brightly coloured tasselled scarf.
Critics say Mswati, who has courted controversy for his lavish lifestyle while two thirds of his
subjects live in abject poverty, sets a bad example by encouraging polygamy and teenage sex in a
country where 40 per cent of adults live with HIV. . . .
‘The Reed Dance has been abused for one man’s personal satisfaction,’ Mario Masuku, leader of the
banned opposition party, said. ‘The king has a passion for young women and opulence.’
But many Swazis say the young monarch has a right to do as he pleases, defending his penchant for
young brides as Swazi tradition and arguing that ceremonies like the Reed Dance, which this year
drew a record 50,000 maidens, cement national identity.
‘The king takes a wife whenever he wants and that’s the way it is. This is our culture and we will
never change,’ said Tsandzile Ndluva, 21, another dancer. (The Washington Times, 30 August 2005,
emphases added)

I quote the above passage at length to make a simple point: there are differences in the cultures
of the world. In conceptualizing global culture one has to recognize and come to terms with plur-
alism. In itself this is not a problem. But with globalization, cultures not only come to be aware of
one another. Sometimes cultures do clash—a phenomenon not invented by Samuel Huntington.
Let us consider another story that broke in the media a year after the story of the polygamous
Swazi king. This story concerns an American, Warren Jeffs, a polygamist and on the FBI’s most-
wanted list alongside hardcore terrorists and drug barons. ‘The leader of the 10,000-member
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’, according to the Los Angeles
Times (30 August 2006), and ‘wanted in Utah and Arizona for alleged involvement in underage

Correspondence Address: Habibul.Khondker@zu.ac.ae

1474-7731 Print=1474-774X Online/06=040441–8 # 2006 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080=14747730601045694
442 H. H. Khondker

marriages, rape and sexual assault’, Jeffs was arrested in late August. Polygamy is against
the law in most countries, yet in some cultures it is viewed as a matter of cultural right.
In Malaysia, Muslim women’s groups have fought against the support given by the ulema to
polygamy. In the Islamic Republic of Iran, although polygamy is legal—meaning the state
does not forbid it—it is seldom practised. In Iran in recent years, the age of marriage has steadily
increased and the fertility rate has fallen, and the literacy rate among Iranian women rose from
28% in 1976 to 80% in 1996 (Roy, 2004, p. 14). In contraceptive prevalence, which refers to
married women ages 15– 49 using any method of contraception, Iran has the highest score
(over 70%) in the Middle East and North Africa (The World Bank, 2004: 49). All these facts
question the image of Iran as a ‘fundamentalist’ stronghold. Yet Iran is not a ‘liberal’ society
either. Changes in culture are not always in the hands of the state elites.
Cultures—the ways of living by a group—are now coterminous with nation-states. Arguments
of cultural relativism are often garbed in nationalist arguments. When Singapore’s founding
leader, Lee Kuan Yew, used to defend ‘Asian values’ or ‘Confucian values’ (which, some
detractors viewed, he had ‘constructed’), he defended the cultural rights of Singapore as a
nation-state. There was no consensus on the values of the Singaporeans as a whole or even
the Singaporean Chinese, which are the dominant ethnic group. At the same time, Tu Wei
Ming, a scholar of Chinese philosophy, argued that Confucianism incorporates a certain
degree of universalism. Confucian values, such as sympathy, distributive justice, duty con-
sciousness, ritual, public-spiritedness, and group orientation, are modern values that can be
universalized (Tu, 2000, p. 265). Drawing a parallel between Confucianism and communitarian
ideology, Tu once suggested that it is only within the framework of liberal democracy that such a
value system will be more applicable, thus implying that the collective orientation this philos-
ophy espouses can be misused under authoritarian systems.
From the above, it becomes clear that how we talk about or frame our discussion of cultural
differences, let alone resolve cultural differences, is highly problematic. One has to recognize
that there are differences in culture. The main issue is not to erase differences but to negotiate
and make peace with differences and discover how to live in peaceful co-existence and reason-
able harmony in a world riven by hostile differences. I want to make a distinction between
hostile differences and benign differences. For example, religion A says that members of religion
B are cursed and should be annihilated or expelled from their country. This is a difference of
which any decent society or sensible people should beware. The radical position of religion
A capitalizes on ‘difference’. This is clearly an example of hostile difference which cannot be
accepted on the ground of harm principle. In another case, if religion C says that its members
should shave off the hair on their head, that difference is easier to accommodate than when
religion D says its members should now commit suicide so they can board a celestial flight to
heaven. The distinction between hostile difference and benign difference is important, although
it may sound commonsensical and simplistic. One of the contributions of cultural relativism and
its modern reincarnation, post-modernism, is to blur this difference between types of difference.
Cultural relativism as an intellectual position—not just confined to anthropological thinking—is
grounded in ‘noble’ sentiments. While a strong or over-determined position of cultural relati-
vism leads to anarchy, a weak relativist position endorsing tolerance of diversity in cultural
practices is not only acceptable but is a required antidote against the position of strong univers-
alism where certainty and absence of doubts can lead to dangerous consequences. The wars,
conflicts, violence, hostilities and animosities around the world today are to a large extent
rooted in positions of strong universalism, which often seeks to erase cultural differences. In
such a milieu, treating cultural differences with realism and sensitivity becomes a moot question.
 Comment: Cultural Conflicts, Fundamentalisms, and Globalization 443

The issue of globalization, seen as a process of intensification of relationship between

societies in economic, social, political and cultural practices and ideas, is relevant because it
has brought some of these cultures into close proximity resulting, in conflicts. As globalization,
by compressing time and space, creates ‘the world as a single place’ (Robertson, 1992), it inten-
sifies the problem of the incommensurability of human values and cultures, a problem which
cannot be easily ignored or trivialized (Turner, 2006).
Islam as a religion has become the subject of acrimonious debates, forcing commentators to
take either a hostile or defensive position. The rise of Islamic radicalism since the 1970s and
especially since the demise of the ‘really existing’ socialism in the 1980s and early 1990s,
has taken centre stage. The terrorist attacks of 9/11 have intensified the focus on Islam,
rightly or wrongly. Apparently, Prime Minister Tony Blair, on his way to Washington soon
after the attacks, took a copy of the holy Quran as reading material on his flight. I doubt
whether he found any clue there to understand the sad and cruel events of 9/11.Various
terms have been used to capture these changes, ranging from ‘Islamism’ (Kepel, 2004), ‘political
Islam’ (Fuller, 2003), ‘radical Islam’, ‘Islamic extremism’ and, of course, ‘fundamentalism’.
Muslims living in Europe have been particularly targeted. The events of early September
2006 were particularly shocking, where an Islamic boarding school and a Halal Chinese restau-
rant in the UK were raided by police anti-terrorist squads. In 2005 France became a major site of
confrontation between North African Muslim immigrants and the police. Scholars and commen-
tators on the Muslim immigrants are divided, espousing either an integrationist or a ‘multi-
culturalist’ view. For example, Basam Tibi argued, before 9/11, that Islam is faced with the
problem of intolerance and needs to be more accommodative. His idea of ‘Euro-Islam’ is the
position of universalism and pragmatism. His position is that Muslims living in Europe need
to follow the European rules and respect the host culture. And, in fact, many do. While much
is known about the double standards of government policies, not much is given on the double
standards of immigrant communities. Often one meets Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims in
North America who make a robust defence of minority rights, invoking multiculturalism, but
are unwilling to grant similar rights to minority communities in their respective homelands.
Many immigrant families live in two cultures, the culture of the parents and the culture of the
children, giving rise to not only day-to-day frictions, but also devastating tragedies.
Recently, in Italy, a Pakistani father allegedly killed his 20-year-old daughter, Hina Saleem,
for deviating from her (or her parents’) cultural traditions. According to the news report, she was
killed ‘because her traditional Muslim father objected to her Western lifestyle’. The Muslim
community in Italy condemned this, saying ‘murder is a sin, not only a crime’ (Povoledo,
2006). This tragedy highlighted the problem of dual culture or cultural conflict within the
same family. With increasing immigration, this is not a unique or one-off problem. It is a
problem of globalization, by which we mean, at least, sociologically enhanced interaction and
intercultural exchanges.
The problem of so-called Islamic fundamentalism has come to light in part as a consequence
of globalization. Whether or not fundamentalism is a global category (Lechner, 1993) is a matter
of some contention (Turner, 2006), but no one denies the link between globalization and funda-
mentalism. Thompson correctly identifies a variety of fundamentalisms. But to equate Le Pen or
other tendencies on the political right (for example, in the United States there are several racist
factions and parties) with religious fundamentalism is unhelpful for the reason that what seems
to be a position of religious fundamentalism is often a cover for a political position.
Thompson’s definition of fundamentalism—‘a militant form of piety that amounts to a rebel-
lion against modern secularism’—follows the position of Marty and other writers that may be
444 H. H. Khondker

called a ‘reactive position’ (Marty and Appleby, 1991). It is a reaction to something: for most
writers, to ‘modernization’ and, for some, (post-)modernity. Some see it as irrational, obscuran-
tist, while others see it as rational. In the words of Bruce (2000, p. 117), ‘Fundamentalism is a
rational response of traditionally religious peoples to social, political and economic changes that
downgrade and constrain the role of religion in the public world’. Islam was compatible with the
project of modernity as both streams of ideas denounced magical beliefs, localism, hedonism
and traditionalism (Turner, 1991). Islam sought to provide an alternative modernity but did
not denounce modernity. There were, however, other groups who took the reactionary position
of status quo ante. These groups longed to return to a golden past. The rise and co-existence of
Sufi traditions and various schools of populist Islamic tradition were always aspects of Islamic
societies. Turner (1991, p. 161) argues that Islamic fundamentalism is a response to postmodern-
ism, since it is a reaction against cultural and social differentiation and fragmentation.
Fundamentalism has been a controversial term when applied to Islam. Although chronologi-
cally the term fundamentalism was first used in the 1920s with regard to the southern Baptists in
the US, it can be argued that qualitatively these two fundamentalisms are more different than
similar. Islamic fundamentalism is, at one level, a sectarian movement. That is, one group is
standing out in holding extreme positions as to what is authentic Islam and how one should
live, but there is some sympathy for such positions. The so-called moderate or mainstream
Muslims are critical of Islamic extremism that leads to violence and terrorism, but in so far
as piety is concerned they remain either ambivalent or even sympathetic. The idea of ummah
makes it possible to create the sphere of sympathy. When Thompson says fundamentalism is
not confined to Islam he is right, but he does not stress the differences. Bruce (2000) refers to
the difference between individualistic Protestant fundamentalism and communal Islamic funda-
mentalism. Basam Tibi argues that Hindu fundamentalists are interested in returning to a puritan
form of Hindusim, but they do not want to impose such puritanism on other groups. Some seg-
ments of Islamic fundamentalists want the whole world to come under the fold of puritanical
Islam. The recent Al-Qaida videotape urging Americans to embrace Islam is an example,
albeit crude, of such aspiration. This idea of imposing one’s extreme views is, however, not
all that common.
The idea of ‘secular fundamentalism’ is somewhat problematic. In commenting on firebrand
Bangladeshi woman writer Taslima Nasreen, I used the phrase ‘secular fundamentalism’
(Khondker, 1994), by which I meant that some writers and liberal intellectuals in Bangladesh
carried their secular position a little too far by attacking religion in a strident manner. For
example, Nasreen once argued that the Quran, which for Muslims is a revealed text, should
be thoroughly revised. She made these comments in an interview on Australian television
while she had a cigarette in one hand and the Quran in the other. Such behaviour does not
help the fight against religious bigotry and extremism. But the term secular fundamentalism
is inappropriate. Secularism, as an attendant of pluralistic liberal social and political traditions,
has many varieties. For example, the American version of secularism, with the presence of God
on the dollar bill, is surely different from the French version of secularism. The trajectory of the
rise of secularism in the model of European Enlightenment with industrialization and democra-
tization may not be a universal path. In the Middle East, secularism was a state ideology of the
dictators ranging from the Shah of Iran to Saddam Hussein (Roy, 2004). One could argue that the
return of Islamic rule and procedural democracy, in the sense of elections, parliamentarianism
and so on, went hand-in-hand in post-revolutionary Iran.
When Thompson talks about two kinds of fundamentalism, he is in error, because to refer to
‘market fundamentals’ does not imply that there is a compulsion to follow the principles of the
 Comment: Cultural Conflicts, Fundamentalisms, and Globalization 445

market and to treat it as sacred or above criticism. It is in the same metaphorical vein that many
writers in the past considered Marxism as a religion, where The Communist Manifesto was con-
sidered to be the functional equivalent of the Bible. Do the market fundamentalists regard Adam
Smith’s The Wealth of Nations as their bible? In fact, Benjamin Barber is partly responsible for
evoking the image of Jihad versus McWorld (corporations, market) as comparable. Although
Barber’s points are well taken—that is, that liberal democracy is threatened by both traditional
values, especially religious conservatism, and corporate capitalism—these two processes are not
equivalent. Modern lifestyles of reckless consumerism, hedonism and meaninglessness are
targets of fundamentalist religious leaders.
Thompson’s suggestion that for conventional economists national borders are a nuisance is
problematic. National borders do not necessarily impede extension of the market, protectionism
does. National borders provide a useful economic function by restricting and regulating the
supply of labor, while allowing the free flow of capital. That the international division of
labor is predicated on core/periphery-like societies is not just a Wallersteinian argument; it
follows from the logic of the market and is premised on the notion of comparative advantage.
The certitude that Thompson attributes to the fundamentalists applies to all the believers of
Islamic faith or for that matter to most major religions. So the issue of certitude or even idealized
version of ourselves is too broad a description to describe religious believers as such and not just
fundamentalists. Invoking Freudian categories of narcissism of minor difference is interesting
but not helpful. It may be more pertinent to situate the issue of fundamentalism in the social
context, rather than falling back on psychoanalytic categories.
Thompson invokes Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents to argue that the discontents pro-
duced by the march of modern civilization, or in Weber’s words ‘disenchantment’, produced the
grounds for the rise of fundamentalism. Following the sociological tenets of Weber, Durkheim,
and Parsons, Riaz Hassan (2003) has indicated:
Modernity in its political and social forms refers to increasing specialisation of societal institutions
like political systems, law, economic management, and education in isolation from religion. Unlike
social life in the pre-modern era, in modernity these functions are carried out free from the overarch-
ing influence of religion. From this perspective, religious fundamentalism – in the sense of a return
to a purist past – is a problem produced by the encounter between modernity and the Muslim ummah
in all its diversity and cultural hybridity.

This argument, though fairly standarized, fails to account for the fact that the process of
modernization has been around for the past two centuries, yet fundamentalism as a religious
and cultural movement arose only in the last two or three decades. It also fails to take into
account the various strands of reformist and modernizing movements in Islam. Hassan contends
that though the strength of fundamentalism varies, ‘it is clear that in a globalising world diversity
and cultural crossovers will become a matter of routine. Instead of eliminating hybridity, this
may in fact transform different Islamic countries and regions into autonomous cultural
systems, thus posing a challenge to the conventional categorical oppositions of “us” and
“them”, “Muslim” and “others”.’ For Hassan:
The struggle between ‘hybridity’ and ‘authenticity’ represents perhaps the most important challenge
of globalisation for the Muslim ummah. It is one of the underlying causes of the emergence of
Islamic fundamentalist movements. Fundamentalism refers to a strategy used by followers of
Islamic ‘purists’ like Maududi, Syed Qutb and Ayatuallah Khomenei to assert their own construction
of religious identity and Islamic social order as the exclusive basis for a re-created political and
social order. They feel that Islamic religious identity is at risk and is being eroded by cultural and
religious hybridity. They try to fortify their interpretations of religious ways of being through
446 H. H. Khondker

their selective retrieval and particular reading of Islamic doctrines and practices from a sacred past.
(Hassan 2003)

The issue of identity, especially its unidimensionality, poses a special problem. Amartya Sen
points out that whether one subscribes to a clash of civilizations or dialogue of civilizations, one
is guilty of the same mistake of reductionism. The reduction of a person’s various identities to
only one dimension, that is, religion, has been roundly criticized by Amartya Sen (2006a). In his
words,

The increasing tendency to overlook the many identities that any human being has and to try to
classify individuals according to a single allegedly pre-eminent religious identity is an intellectual
confusion that can animate dangerous divisiveness. An Islamist instigator of violence against infidels
may want Muslims to forget that they have any identity other than being Islamic. What is surprising
is that those who would like to quell that violence promote, in effect, the same intellectual disorien-
tation by seeing Muslims primarily as members of an Islamic world. The world is made much more
incendiary by the advocacy and popularity of single-dimensional categorization of human beings,
which combines haziness of vision with increased scope for the exploitation of that haze by the cham-
pions of violence. (Sen 2006b, emphasis added)

Sen takes Samuel Huntington’s influential 1998 book, The Clash of Civilizations and the
Remaking of the World Order, to task for projecting this imagined singularity.
However, Sen too does not go deep enough into the politics and structural factors that foster
those categories.
Transformations in religious identity and broad shifts in religious values, say Islam, need to be
traced historically in light of, if not necessarily as responses to, broader political and economic
changes. In that sense the rise and decline of Islamic rationalism, or the Mutazilah movement,
provides a good example. The rational discourse in Islam arguing for rational interpretation of
Islamic texts—that is, valuing reason (one’s judgment), or Ijtihad, rather than faith—was an idea
that evolved with social transformation in the late 8th and 9th century under the Abbasid rule. In
both Baghdad and Basra in Iraq, this movement flourished at the time of the Abbasid caliph
al-Mamun. Yaqub Alkindi, al-Farabi and Avicenna were representatives of this tradition.
They translated the Greek philosophers and initiated rational interpretation of Islam. The fact
that the Mutazilah movement is rarely discussed in contemporary debates is a sign of the hege-
mony of a faith-based textual Islam in the contemporary world.
In modern times, the rise of reforms in Islam can be traced to anti-colonial and nationalist
contexts. The ideas of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1702–1794), the putative fountain head
of fundamentalism or Wahhabism, grew both as a denouncement of Sufi traditions and as a
protest of the centralized Ottomon rule. In the Indian context, home to one quarter of the
world’s Muslims, Islamic movements clearly showed many tendencies, some orthodox (or funda-
mentalist) and others reformist. For example, the Farazi movement in early 19th century Bengal, a
peasant movement against the colonial rulers and local overlords, was not simply a class-based
movement; it was inspired by Wahhabism. The author of this movement, Haji Shariatullah
(1781–1840), spent 20 years in Mecca, where he came under the influence of the Wahhabis
(Karim, 1999). The reformist traditions in Islam in undivided India made important contributions
to making peace between the colonial modernist project and the modernization of the Muslim com-
munity, who were initially reluctant even to partake in English education. The orthodox Muslims
too are divided between fundamentalist Jamaat-e-Islami and Tablighi Jamaat. The latter shows a
penchant for keeping themselves to the religious sphere: the annual gathering of the Tablighi
Jamaat at Tongi, Bangladesh, is the second-largest gathering of Muslims in the world after the
 Comment: Cultural Conflicts, Fundamentalisms, and Globalization 447

Hajj. Their main duty is to remind Muslims to follow the path of religion as enunciated in the Quran
and Sunnah. The former has now become part of the mainstream political process.
The history of Indian anti-colonial struggle, the creation of Pakistan in 1947—supposedly a
land for the Muslims of the region—and its truncation in the creation of Bangladesh in 1971
illustrates the interplay of politics and religion. The creation of Pakistan was a unique event
which played a role in revitalizing the role of religion in politics, although the leadership of
this new nation had impeccable secular credentials. The independence of Bangladesh from
Pakistan in 1971 seemed to destroy the myth of religion-based nationalism, but the return of
the religion-based political parties in collaboration with the military dictators unraveled secular-
ism (Khondker, 2004). The Islam-based electoral politics in Bangladesh has not only entrenched
the power of the Islamists but also routinized intimidation, violence and rape against Hindu min-
orities, especially during the time of national elections (Rafi, 2005). The religion-based party
Jamaat-e-Islami has become over time a key political party in both Pakistan and Bangladesh.
In the summer of 2006, when the US Assistant Secretary of State visited Bangladesh,
he found time to meet the leaders of Jamaat-e-Islami, in part to recognize and appreciate
their role in parliamentary politics.
The present changes and the rise of multipolar tendencies within Islam need to be situated in
both the larger context of global politics as well as the local imperatives of politics, and some-
times these two processes become closely linked, as in the case of Pakistan and under General
Zia-ul-Haq. General Zia, an admirer of Maududi, the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami and a major
protagonist of political Islam, took power in a military coup and promoted Islamism. He also
received active support from the US for his role in helping the Taliban through Pakistan’s intel-
ligence services. In Afghanistan, the Taliban came to power in 1996 with the help of the
Pakistani secret service (Kepel, 2004, p. 11). To ignore the bedrock of power politics and try
to deal with religion as an autonomous process can be simply inadequate.
The argument that fundamentalists do not care about different cultures, therefore it is not a
cultural movement, is based on a fallacy. One can turn this on its head and argue that
because fundamentalism is deeply cultural—albeit monocultural—it must attack, demean and
denounce other cultures. Just because the Taliban destroyed the Buddhist images at Bamiyan
and banned radios and computers does not mean that fundamentalism is against all cultures.
Fundamentalism poses a challenge to the world order because it is a social movement. It is
very important to look at the plurality of religious fundamentalisms, and within Islam one
must identify different strands of fundamentalisms. What was significant about the destruction
of the Buddhist images in Afghanistan by the obscurantist Taliban is that it invoked sharp criti-
cism from Iran and Egypt. The very fact that Iran protested the destruction of the images
suggests that there are varieties of Islamic fundamentalism.
Thompson’s attempt to differentiate fundamentalism as a religious movement as opposed to a
social and political movement is in sharp contrast with Oliver Roy’s position. Roy uses the
carefully chosen phrase ‘neofundamentalism’, by which he means ‘a closed, scripturalist and
conservative view of Islam that rejects the national and statist dimension in favour of the
ummah, the universal community of all Muslims, based on sharia (Islamic Law)’ (Roy, 2004,
p.1). Although his discussion of global Islam and the rise of neofundamentalism are focused
primarily on the alienated immigrant Muslim communities in the West and can be regarded
as a consequence of globalization, it has relevance for the discussion of the Islamic religious
resurgence in the world as whole.
Thompson takes a liberal position endorsing a world of pluralistic cosmopolitanism based on
hybridity. Thompson’s advice that ours is a ‘pluriverse’ (Latour) and not a universe is helpful
448 H. H. Khondker

because it reminds us of an unmistakable consequence of globalization, which produces an inte-

grated but not homogenized world. However, the vision of a pluralistic cosmopolitanism—
which is cosmopolitanism in the truest sense of the term and was consistent with Tagore’s
view of cosmopolitanism—may not be shared by all the parties involved. It takes two to
tango and two to hybridize. The challenge is how to make all the parties share a minimally
defined common vision.
Robertson’s theoretical points will help us understand some of these points. Robertson does
not see the process of globalization as a non-linear victorious march of universalism over parti-
cularism creating a harmonious, integrated world. ‘Particularism and localism go hand in hand
with universalism and cosmopolitanism’ (Robertson, 1991, p. 283). In this vein ‘sameness’ and
‘difference’ are not mutually exclusive categories, nor are they at odds with each other. In a
globalized world, whether we look at it as universe or pluriverse, such contradictions are not
going to disappear but will remain the rationale for co-existence.

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Habibul Haque Khondker is Professor and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral
Sciences at Zayed University, Abu Dhabi, UAE. He has published articles on globalization,
state, civil society, democracy, famine, internet, science and gender issues. He is the co-
editor (with Goran Therborn) of Asia and Europe in Globalization: Continents, Regions, and
Nations (Brill, 2006). He is on the editorial board of Globalizations and Journal of Classical
Sociology, and is currently writing a book, Globalization: East/West, with Bryan Turner.