An Interview with George Rupp

George Rupp is the president of the International Rescue Committee, an agency that provides assistance to refugees around the world. In Globalization Challenged: Conviction, Conflict, Community, George Rupp outlines the steps necessary to engage the contemporary conflict between traditional religious belief and Western secularism. The book also includes responses from Jagdish Bhagwati, Jeremy Waldron, and Wayne Proudfoot as well as Rupp’s responses to their arguments. Here is an interview with Rupp about the book: nnQuestion: How does your line of argument relate to other recent books on globalization—for example, Jagdish Bhagwati’s In Defense of Globalization or Joseph Stiglitz’s Making Globalization Work? nnGeorge Rupp: I have learned a lot about the processes of globalization from economists like Bhagwati and Stiglitz, but my focus is less on the economic issues themselves than on the ramifications of globalization for broader social and cultural relations.nnQ: How so?nnGR: My subtitle (Conviction, Conflict, Community) indicates the range of such connections. Personal convictions are almost unavoidably particular. In recent decades, conflicts have become very much local, often occurring for protracted periods within a nominally unified country. Communities are almost by definition provincial or even exclusive. All three—conviction, conflict, and community—challenge or resist or reject globalization, and yet the context of globalization unavoidably shapes or changes each of them.nnQ: Take the case of community. It seems straightforward that the processes of globalization may undermine the authority or even the viability of traditional communities. But how do such communities pose a challenge to globalization?nnGR: At the furthest extreme, resistance to globalization can take the form of terrorism. The prevailing cultural mores and institutional patterns of the secular West are not seen simply as a threat to traditional convictions but are tenaciously opposed as corrupt, evil, unacceptable. Even far short of this extreme, the resistance of traditional communities to globalization can thwart what might otherwise be salutary outcomes of greater interdependence.nnQ: What do you propose as an approach to dealing with this antagonism?nnGR: I advocate an approach that does not require antagonists of globalization to accept the premises of the secular West. Instead of explicitly or implicitly denigrating particular convictions or local communities, we must show how commitments that are particular and local can relate positively to more inclusive contexts. The challenge that confronts all of us worldwide is how to relate particular communities to more inclusive ones.nnQ: Does “worldwide” mean in the developed world as well as in the developing world?nnGR: Yes. In much of the developed world, a large fraction of the secular urban population is uprooted or even alienated from such traditional mediating institutions as religious organizations, social clubs, and even extended families. Consequently, individuals increasingly relate to one another and to the larger society through such impersonal vehicles as markets, big bureaucracies, mass communications, and the media. In such settings, reinvigorating appropriate mediating institutions is, or at least should be, a major priority.nnQ: And how does this issue of relating particular communities to more inclusive ones appear in the developing world? nnGR: The work of the International Rescue Committee in such places as Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Sudan demonstrates that the challenge in much of the developing world is to move from deeply rooted loyalties to those most closely related in terms of extended family, language, and ethnicity to increasingly inclusive communities. Those deeply held loyalties are often a source of protracted conflict and as such exemplify the exclusionary and oppositional potential of community. The ideal of inclusive community that I commend seeks to incorporate local and highly particular communities in ways that affirm what is admirable in their core values, commitments, and identities, even as their tendencies toward exclusion are called into question.nnQ: So you are advocating a position that both affirms the process of increasing interconnection expressed by the term “globalization” and at the same time acknowledges the power of particular convictions and local communities? nnGR: Yes.