Politics, geography and political geography

If you look at particular cases or at the variation of the relevant socio-economic indicators, such as GDP per capita or human development index, you will find out that in fact the gaps in economic terms between developed countries on one side and the developing countries on the other side have been widening lately. The sharpest disparities have occurred within the group of developing countries: only some of them have been able to take advantage of the benefits of globalization - Brazil, China, Mexico, Indonesia have been attractive to international investment flows; others have experienced economic decline and stagnation, for example, in about 70 countries of the world average incomes are lower today than they were in 1980.

-social conflicts and movements of resistance - have two major origins: cultural one is based on the increasing pressure of the global forces and the local inertia trying to resist against the identity dilution (from the cultural point of view, the globalization process is considered to be a homogenization process -are we going to deal with national identities in 50 years, in 100 years or we are going to deal with the world system as a uniform cultural entity; ethnic one caused by two apparently opposing trends:

both re-emergent nationalism and new supra-national identities are developing on the globe. Let's take Europe as an example: nationalistic tensions in Northern Ireland, in Basque Region Spain, in Corsican Island in France, in former Yugoslavian space and the enlargement process of the European Union.