Contemporary politics, this book contends, depend upon the turbulent


struggles and strategies around scale. Confl icts over scale can be seen


as opaque class struggles. Political projects, whether from the ground up


or representing corporate or state interests, continually contest the scale at


which authority is vested. This volume looks at the way global corporations


redefi ne the scale of power and how working- class and other movements


build alliances and cross scales to develop political blocs. What injustices


are perpetrated or, more hopefully, redressed in this process? The book,


consisting of contributions from anthropologists, geographers, and cultural


studies scholars, explores theoretical issues around contested temporal and


spatial scales, and around variations in scale from the body to the global.


Part I focuses on bodies in motion, entangled in battles over new boundaries


and political coalitions, and the ways in which migrants and refugees


are disrupted by intersecting time scales. Part II on the nation- state addresses


the shifting responsibilities assigned by law at diff erent historical moments


and the impact of global energy trade on national austerity policies. Part


III, on rescaling sovereignty, discusses the misleading media discourse on


"Brexit" and reconstructs the class bases of the move to the Right in Eastern


Europe that threaten the EU. Part IV on the histories of changing scales of


movements revisits historical debates on uneven and combined development,


and sets out the transnational labor movements of the eighteenthand


nineteenth- century Atlantic, which prefi gure contemporary struggles of


labor in a world which is still one of uneven and combined capitalist development.


Finally, Part V considers ways in which some social movements are


constrained by scale while others reshape parties and traverse nations in their


eff orts to build class alliances and political blocs.