Circumvention – powerful interests coopt the alt to justify exploitation

Introductions to edited collections carry with them the risk of squeezing complicated and rich accounts into particular conceptual boxes and thus drawing attention away from other possibilities for reflection and analysis (Jeffrey and Dyson, 2008). But it is important to identify two interconnected themes of this theme issue. First, several of the papers are concerned with how dominant political actors, such as the state, business interests, and political parties, deploy notions of cosmopolitanism to reproduce and legitimate their power. The manner in which cosmopolitanism may be entwined in the efforts of governments, corporations, educators, media organizations, and political parties to justify and extend their dominance is a theme richly present inmany other geographical and anthropological studies (eg Brennan, 2001; Ferguson,2006; Mitchell, 2007). According to Brennan (2001), the most powerful global cosmopolitan movement in the contemporary era is the small coterie of financiers and policymakers working to elaborate a neoliberal economic project. As England and Ward(2007) have recently noted, one of the most distinctive aspects of this dominant set of agents is their ability to move rapidly and smoothly across cultural and national boundaries (see also Sparke, 2005). It is not only that powerful governments, political movements, and media organizations have the means to develop complex assemblages of bodies, politics, and technologies that move across the world, but also that many of these organizations are engaged in producing discourses of cosmopolitanism and cultural openness that support their claims to power. In dramaturgical terms, transnational networking is both the context of the drama and the theme of the play (see alsoBebbington and Kothari, 2006; McFarlane, 2006). Thus, for example, the current emphasis of the US governments to promote cultural awareness, language learning, and empathy in schools is often grounded in a narrow and chauvinist concern with geopolitical security and aggrandizing projects of rule, and this is the sense in which Mitchell (2007) writes of ``strategic cosmopolitanism''. Nor is this a recent phenomenon. European empires often deployed cultural awareness as a means of governing populations, and the formation of area studies in the US during the Cold War was tiedto the geopolitical imperative of gaining knowledge of other cultures and languages (Miyoshi, 2002).