World Citizen Symbol
Author: DasRakel
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org
Licence: http://creativecommons.org

The 'global village' will first become nameable and accessible when the 'economy,' the 'policy,' and the 'transnational networks' acknowledge the de-territorialized and de-temporal dissolution of the boundaries created by political and economic intervention. The 'global village' will first make worldwide peaceful coexistence possible when military, economic, and political powers stop being against 'other worlds' - in the sense that different logics of action, production and reproduction are dominant - which thereby foster marginalization, widespread hunger and poverty. The 'global village' will appear as conceivable and thereby as an alternative course of action when transnational solution competences for social and ecological problems receive decisively more weight than the hegemonic interests and individualistic nature of the current economic system. There is still a significant gap between 'world rhetoric' and global political practices.

This gap will only be bridged when the planets economic, social, political and ecological transformations are met with new practices of knowledge. Knowledge cannot be realized through further exponential growth, as a result of a constant increase of individuals and social metabolic rates. In this sense it is becoming ever more pertinent to consider not only the safeguarding and improvement of the quality of life, but also the maintenance of earth's habitat for future generations. This includes respect and sharing of indigenous bodies of knowledge that have long been ignored by western thought, that have gone so far as to systematically devalue non-western ideologies. Additionally the new practice of knowledge, in aiming to add to a fundamental preservation strategy and promotion of life, must address the current state of science and the economic, political, social and individual actions underlying our perception of time. The deterritorialization and reterritorialization resulting from the acceleration of production and consumption from exponential growth presuppose the irrationality of the destruction of time. We invest our future in the self-indulgent present, which blocks our ability to perceive what is happening around us: eighty per cent of employed people in industrialized countries have the subjective feeling that they have too little time, that they are rushed, that they can no longer take time for themselves, and as a result they are in a state of feeling they might be left behind at any moment. The present has become an intermediate phase on the path to attaining future objectives. Upon reaching these goals it becomes apparent that they have lost a very large portion of their present. Despite the fact that life in wealthy nations is 'safer' and longer than it has ever been before, it seems there is no possible future that can be described, defined or even expected to be relatively reliable.

Click to enlarge:: KFC in Muharraq Island, Bahrain.
Author: Andries Oudshoorn
Source: http://commons.wikimedia.org
Licence: http://creativecommons.org

This worldwide social and philosophical dilemma corresponds to the limits of growth. Even though we no longer have any time to waste, it takes somewhat longer for these limitations to be realized worldwide and also for their political urgency to be recognized, which is currently the case with human-induced global warming. We cannot go 'back' but we can organize the thinking of the future differently 'ahead of time'. The new practice of knowledge realizes other temporal structures, not those that are constantly exponentially accelerating in a 'linear fashion' but those that are 'cyclical.' The linear time patterns were used to adopt the Western world's dramatic 'omnipotence' complex in order to comprehensively 'conquer the world.' Only within a 'cyclical concept of time' that also allows limitation and repetition can concepts of sustainable development be put into practice, in the ecological, social or interpersonal areas.

In the 'global village' - as a prerequisite for the long-term preservation of our habitat - people will be made aware of the interdependence between poverty and wealth, between exponential growth and the dangers of our habitat, between temporal structures and social behavior, between the historical genesis of deterritorialization and the political and ethical urgency to reterritorialize, resulting from the compression of production and reproduction areas of our smaller worlds. The 'global village' strategy should look beyond the preconception that only one ideology could exist and instead design its priorities to reflect the opportunities of the generations to come.

We as researchers, lecturers and students, as academics and people working in the field of development cooperation and development policies have to contribute to the empowerment of marginalized populations in order to foster their active participation in the various transformative processes of the present and the future - locally and globally.

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