Urbanities,
Vol. 3
·
No 1
·
May 2013
© 2013
Urbanities
116
environment makes this a ‘bittersweet’
experience. Mélissa Gauthier’s discussion
of the impact of U.S. border securitization
on Mexico’s border-crossing ‘ant traders’
highlights a series of important further
paradoxes. The livelihoods of these
smugglers depend on the existence of
international borders (so the open borders
that Matthews advocates might not be
advantageous to all participants in
globalization from below). In the past, they
could count on a combination of
corruption and pragmatic ‘flexibility’ on
the part of officials to maintain a border
that operated in a way that made their
smuggling viable. New technologies
justified by the need to address the traffic
in arms that fuels drug wars and the flow
of narco-dollars seem to have had little
impact on those problems but have made
life more difficult for small-scale
smugglers. Gauthier (p. 151) remains
sceptical about the practical possibility of
border security policies overwhelming the
illicit networks ‘which are culturally and
socioeconomically part of the borderland
economy’ in the North, and are equally
integral to Mexico’s southern border with
Guatemala, as Rebecca Galemba (2009)
has shown. Yet it is clear that borders
remain key sites of contention in the
processes of both hegemonic and non-
hegemonic globalization, and their
securitization may be another way of
seeking to resolve the contradictions of
Northern models of development by
promoting ‘adaptive self-reliance’ in the
global South. As Mark Duffield (2010) has
pointed out, microcredit schemes are one
such lever of ‘adaptive self-reliance’ and
in another chapter of the present volume
Ritajyoti
Bandyopadhyay
uses
microfinance provided by for-profit
institutions as an example of how ‘high-
end globalization needs a quarantined low-
end globalization to continuously provide
for itself the conditions for its hegemony’
(p. 183). His historically nuanced analysis
of the evolving relationship between
hawkers and shopping mall developments
in Calcutta shows that synergistic
relationships can be established with
corporatized retailing giants, but also
suggests that we need to see the deepened
hegemony that may lie behind continuing
co-existence, in terms of winning the
consent of poorer citizens to urban
redevelopment programs and incorporating
more of them into the processes of
accumulation
associated
with
the
construction of housing and extension of
consumer credit.
This book does not include any
case studies from Europe, and it remains to
be seen how effective current efforts on
the part of ‘old’ centres of accumulation to
