Abstract
In this paper we argue that globalization is the outcome of processes that involve real actors—economic and political—with real interests. Examining how these processes work, however, requires systematic investigation into the organization and strategies of particular actors whose horizons and scale of activity might be described as ‘global’. In this paper we focus on the growing importance of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in promoting the liberalization of trade, in particular the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), and its implications for education. Under the GATS, education, a largely public good coordinated by nation-states, is reconceptualised as a private service to be exchanged in the global marketplace. In this paper we draw upon a set of concepts being developed by theorists such as Lefebvre, Harvey, Brenner, Collinge, and Jessop around the production of space, scale, and its socio-political contestation. Specifically we argue, through an analysis of the WTO/GATS and its restructuring of education, that complex this involves complex processes of both ‘reterritorialisation’ and ‘re-scaling’. We suggest, however, that these processes are deeply contradictory and raise questions about the capacity of ‘transformed’ states to absorb these contradictions in the face of displacements of state activity and power.