Introduction
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not close the door on this possibility but argues that there is much more work to do.
This is certainly the case as we face yet another and particularly virulent phase of
global restructuring. However, the direction of it need not be a forgone conclusion, for as
we have argued global restructuring is an open-ended process that creates a myriad of (re)
interpretations and contradictions and counter-discourses and practices as activists and
scholars continuously expose the politics of globalization as empire and propose
alternatives to it.
Apropos of the Middlemarch quote we began this revised introduction with,
Arundhati Roy entitled her lead essay in Power Politics (2001) “The Ladies Have
Feelings So . . . Shall We Leave it to the Experts?” Her answer to this is a resounding,
NO! In her most recent An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire (2004) she delineates
what the “experts” have now brought us:
So here we are, the people of the world, confronted with an Empire armed with a
mandate from heaven (and, as added insurance, the most formidable arsenal of
weapons of destruction in history). Here we are, confronted with an Empire that has
conferred on itself the right to go to war at will and the right to deliver people from
corrupting ideologies, from religious fundamentalists, dictators, sexism, and poverty,
by the age-old, tried and tested practice of extermination. Empire is on the move, and
Democracy is its sly new war cry. Democracy, home-delivered to your doorstep by
daisy-cutters. Death is the small price for people to pay for the privilege of sampling
Convention