5.1 - Impact of Global Economic and Technological Forces
Economic globalization involves growing interconnected economic networks across borders, a worldwide market where actors operate regardless of political boundaries, and generally reduced state control over national economies. Cross-national connections among workers, goods, and capital keep deepening, creating real challenges for both regime and cultural stability. Chinese manufacturers export to global markets, Mexican workers compete with labor in Asia, and Nigerian oil prices get set globally rather than domestically, all illustrating how thoroughly national economies are now entangled with the rest of the world.
International Financial Institutions and Liberalization
Membership in institutions like the IMF, World Bank, and WTO tends to promote economic liberalization: privatizing state-owned enterprises, free trade and reduced tariffs, deregulating markets, opening up to foreign investment, and reducing government spending.
China and Nigeria both enacted liberalization policies and show a kind of optimism despite real challenges, with recent studies showing a majority in both countries expecting their children to be better off than they were. China's market reforms since 1978 have produced massive growth and rising living standards that create genuine optimism, even alongside real inequality and environmental costs. Nigeria's privatization of telecommunications and banking and its integration into global oil markets have created periods of growth and hope, even as corruption and inequality persist there too.
Mexico's economic liberalization through NAFTA, privatization, and deregulation has contributed to a growing middle class, with the consumer economy expanding and professional and service-sector jobs increasing, though significant poverty and inequality concerns remain. The general trade-off across all these cases is growth and opportunity on one side against disruption and inequality on the other.
Multinational Corporations
Multinational corporations increasingly dominate global markets in ways that challenge domestic policy across several fronts. On labor, MNCs seek cheap labor while domestic workers demand protections, producing something like a race to the bottom as countries compete by lowering labor standards; Chinese factories, for instance, employ workers at low wages with limited protections specifically to attract MNC investment. On the environment, MNCs often externalize environmental costs onto local communities; Shell's oil extraction in Nigeria's Niger Delta caused massive environmental damage that local communities bear while the corporation's profits flow globally. On land rights, MNCs acquiring land can displace local populations, as when Mexican peasants lost communal lands (ejidos) once neoliberal reforms allowed privatization specifically to attract investment. On taxation, MNCs use tax havens and transfer pricing to avoid national taxes, so countries lose revenue despite hosting the actual corporate operations. And on budget pressures, IMF and World Bank loan conditions often require austerity, forcing governments to cut social spending to satisfy international lenders, as Nigeria experienced under structural adjustment programs demanding spending cuts and privatization in exchange for loans. All of this creates a real sovereignty tension: MNC economic power can override democratic policy preferences, limiting a state's genuine autonomy.
Internal Conflicts Stemming from Globalization
Globalization and neoliberalism tend to provoke internal conflict within states in a few predictable ways.
Civil society demands tend to increase, with globalization empowering groups to demand accountability, environmental protection, labor rights, and continued social spending; Mexican environmental groups oppose MNC-benefiting projects that harm local ecosystems, and Nigerian civil society demands a greater share of oil revenue stay local rather than benefiting international corporations.
Students and other groups harmed by globalization tend to protest: students against neoliberal education cuts and tuition increases, workers against factory closures and wage stagnation, peasants against land privatization, and the urban poor against subsidy elimination. Nigeria's fuel subsidy removal protests are a good example, since the IMF demanded subsidy cuts but citizens protested the resulting higher prices.
Governments often respond with repression: arresting protesters, restricting or monitoring social media, and suppressing movements outright. China's internet censorship partly responds to organizing around economic dislocation, and Russia restricts protest partly to prevent economic grievances from mobilizing opposition more broadly.
Iran and Nigeria show how this plays out. In November 2019, Iran's government suddenly raised gasoline prices by 50 to 200 percent to cut the cost of fuel subsidies; protests spread to more than 100 cities, and the regime shut off almost all internet access for about a week while security forces killed hundreds of protesters and arrested thousands. In Nigeria, after the 2020 #EndSARS protests showed how well young people could organize online, the government suspended Twitter from June 2021 to January 2022, right after the company deleted a post by President Muhammadu Buhari.
And globalization tends to empower nationalist and populist backlash, once-marginal groups that blame elites for globalization's costs, oppose immigration and cultural change, demand protection from global competition, and reject international institutions outright. Brexit reflected exactly this kind of populist nationalism, blaming the EU and globalization for economic anxiety and cultural change, and AMLO in Mexico (president from 2018 to 2024) used populist anti-neoliberal rhetoric blaming past governments for globalization's negative impacts, an approach his successor Claudia Sheinbaum (president as of 2026) has largely kept, while Russian nationalism under Putin frames resistance to Western economic and cultural influence as protecting Russian sovereignty. Globalization tends to create clear winners (educated urban professionals, export industries) and clear losers (manufacturing workers, traditional communities), and that split produces real political polarization.
Technology's Political Impact
Technological forces shape politics alongside these economic ones. Social media enables organizing, as with #EndSARS in Nigeria, and spreads information regimes can't fully control, though it also enables surveillance and disinformation. The internet creates global information flows that undermine censorship, even as states fight back with firewalls and filtering, and it opens economic opportunities alongside real disruption. Mobile technology allows leapfrogging development, like Africa's mobile banking systems, and serves as both a political mobilization tool and a surveillance and control tool depending on who's using it; Iran's Green Movement used social media to organize despite state control, while China's Great Firewall specifically tries to limit technology's liberalizing potential.
Bottom line: economic globalization and liberalization have genuinely mixed effects. On the positive side: economic growth and opportunity, rising middle classes, optimism about the future, and integration into global prosperity. On the negative side: MNC power challenging sovereignty, environmental degradation, labor exploitation, inequality within and between countries, cultural disruption, and job displacement. Politically, this produces civil society mobilization demanding accountability, cycles of protest and repression, nationalist and populist backlash, real challenges to regime stability, and ongoing tension over state sovereignty. Economic integration brings real prosperity but also limits political autonomy and disrupts traditional societies, creating winners who support globalization and losers who resist it, and that split polarizes politics within states.