5 Globalization and the Question of Women Smugglers in East Africa: Observations of a Cross Kenya-Uganda Boundary (1980-2002) Samwel Ong’wen Okuro Defining Globalization and the Place of Africa in the Global Debate To many people, globalization has meant a wide range of complex and contradictory processes and a phenomena characterizing contemporary history. It has become a powerful but malleable metaphor that accommodates widely divergent theoretical, empirical, and ideological paradigms, positions, and possibilities. For its triumphalist supporters, globalization is celebrated as inevitable and progressive, marking the end of history, while for its detractors it reinforces global economic inequalities, political disenfranchisement, and environmental degradation. Depending on how it is defined and perceived, globalization has its advocates, adversaries and those who are ambivalent (Zeleza 2002); it has several conflicting meanings, and in fact the debate about how to characterize globalization and its impact is so contentious that the only consensus is that there is no consensus. For instance, there is a line of thinking that regards globalization as a compression of time and space. In other words, with new technologies that speed transactions and shrink distances, both time barriers and spatial differences are lessened. It is a part of the inherent unfolding modernity and a spur towards interconnectedness. We live in an increasingly interdependent, de-territorialized world, created by the emergence of new transnational information and computer technologies which tear asunder the spatial-temporal divides and distances of the past and they shrink the world, if not into a global village, then into neighbourhoods that are more familiar with each other. The motive is to diminish barriers to the flows of goods, services, information, capital, technology and people. Chap 5, Okuro New.pmd 02/08/2011, 18:16 95