The Thorny Road to Globalization (Public Lecture)
Earlier this month, Queen Mary University of London invited me to deliver a lecture to over four hundred incoming students in the Humanities and Social Sciences. My lecture was made available online on Aug 28. I would like to express my gratitude to Queen Mary for this opportunity to engage with the student community amid a global pandemic. A recording of the lecture is available in the watch section of this website. The full title as well as a short abstract are available below.
The Thorny Road to Globalization: War, Trade and Epidemics as Forces for Creative Destruction
Abstract: Recent backlash against globalization brought attention to the uneven distribution of its benefits. In this lecture, Ivo Ganchev argues that this is not a new phenomenon. He explains why globalization came hand in hand with war and trade and cautions about the internationalization of regional problems such as epidemics. This demonstrates that deepening interconnectivity comes at a high social cost, feeding into a process of continuous creative destruction. The analytical framework of this lecture draws on Ivo’s original social science theory of structural materialism.
