Like a pebble dropped in a pond, globalization is a force that has over the course of history rippled across the world, incorporating its furthest reaches into the political, social, economic, and cultural logic of capitalist modernity. It is at once an agent of connectivity and communication on an unprecedented scale, and a catalyst of crises (such as financial meltdowns, poverty and inequality, socio-political disenfranchisement, urban decay, techno-alienation, cultural homogenization, environmental ruin, corporate hegemony, and neo-imperial warfare) whose intimately human consequences to a large extent define our shared existence on this planet. Adhered to like a religion by its proponents and hotly contested by grass-roots activists around the world, globalization remains perhaps the single most important determinant of our collective future.