When people say "globalization," they usually mean something like Amazon, NATO, or Taylor Swift's world tour. That is, power from above: trade deals, military alliances, viral content. But there's another current, messier and more intimate, often overlooked by analysts and politicians alike. Call it globalization from below.
Coined by scholars and activists in the Global South, "globalization from below" describes the grassroots, everyday practices through which people navigate and resist global structures. It’s how street vendors in Lagos adapt to currency fluctuations caused by IMF policy. How undocumented migrants in Paris build underground economies and care networks. How Indigenous communities in the Amazon use smartphones and satellite data to protect their land from multinational extractivism. It is the global without the globe—localized, embodied, bottom-up.
The Infrastructure of Improvisation
Unlike the top-down architecture of neoliberal globalization—governed by banks, tech platforms, and treaties—globalization from below is powered by informal labor, social networks, and tactical adaptability. Its infrastructure is not made of servers and cables, but of hustle, kinship, and Whatsapp groups.
You see it in the remittance economies that sustain entire villages. In diasporic fashion styles that remix tradition and pop. In border towns where people live transnational lives with no passport. It is what anthropologist Aihwa Ong might call "flexible citizenship" applied to survival.
These practices are often invisible to economists but deeply visible to those living them. They form what sociologist Saskia Sassen called "counter-geographies of globalization": spaces where the marginalized forge global connections not in spite of their exclusion, but because of it.
Resistance, Not Just Resilience
It would be a mistake to romanticize this. Globalization from below is born from necessity, not choice. It emerges from structural violence—from austerity, displacement, climate collapse. But it is also a site of resistance. It shows that even within oppressive systems, people find ways to create solidarity, autonomy, meaning.
Think of the Zapatistas, who in 1994 declared their own autonomous zones in response to NAFTA. Or the global network of climate justice movements led by youth, farmers, and Indigenous activists. These are not just reactions; they are alternative visions of the global.
Rethinking the Global
What would it mean to take globalization from below seriously—not just as coping mechanism, but as epistemology? As a way of knowing the world that starts not from capitals, but from margins?
It means recognizing that modernity doesn’t only come from the West. That networks don’t only run through Silicon Valley. That global power is not just about scale, but about intimacy: the slow solidarities of mutual aid, the encrypted conversations of exiles, the art of getting by.
In a moment when the dominant order of globalization seems to be collapsing under its own contradictions—war, pandemics, climate crisis—it is worth turning our gaze downward. Not as an act of pity, but of learning.
Because maybe the future is not something that will trickle down from G7 summits or AI labs. Maybe it's already being quietly built in shipping containers, WhatsApp threads, and protest camps.
From below.
See also:
Carry-On Selves: How Transnational Identities Repack the Idea of Home