(From left to right): Kwame Nkrumah, Ronald Reagan, Captain Ibrahim Traore, 1999 Seattle WTO Protests, Trump Liberation Day
In 2025, we’re watching headlines bounce between Donald Trump’s renewed tariff plans and the impending doom of a “Second Great Depression”, — and China’s expanding influence in global markets to Burkina Faso’s President Ibrahim Traoré openly rejecting Western economic dictates. Online, people joke about the incoming “Chinese Century” as the U.S. flails to regain a grip on a global economy and the cultural capital it once controlled—but the humor masks something more profound: the end of American economic exceptionalism and the tantrum that follows.
The so-called “trade war” with China, championed across party lines, isn’t about protecting American workers. It’s the delayed fallout of choices made decades ago—when Reagan-era deregulation met Deng Xiaoping’s market reforms, when corporate elites willingly dismantled American industry in exchange for record profits abroad, and when we welcomed China into the World Trade Organization thinking we’d always stay on top. Instead, working-class communities across the U.S. were hollowed out, unions were gutted, and now the ruling class wants a scapegoat for the long-term decline they engineered.
This teaching material isn’t about deciphering Trump’s incoherent tariff policies or romanticizing a “strong economy” under Biden—who quietly continued the trade policies enacted during Trump’s first term and the fundamental fact that American workers haven’t had a considerable pay raise in over 40 years. It’s about locating the real contradiction: the inherent instability of neoliberal capitalist globalization. Today’s rising prices, broken supply chains, and deep inequality across the globe aren’t signs of a system in temporary crisis—they’re signs of a system doing exactly what it was built to do.
Why Teach Globalization Through a Critical Lens?
Globalization is often framed as an inevitable, apolitical process– but it’s deeply rooted in historical patterns of exploitation, colonization, and class struggle. Teaching students about this system means helping them connect contemporary issues—like the decline of unions, sweatshop labor, or the cost of living—to the global institutions and policies that shape them. It requires a critical lens–one that helps learners understand not just why there might be fewer products on the shelves, but why many won’t have money to spend in the first place. It aims to trace how colonial histories, corporate greed, and global resistance movements shape the world they’re inheriting. And most importantly, to ask: What comes next?
In the links below, there outlines high-school level supplemental teaching material that can be used across subjects and units. Through a series of lectures, readings, curated multimedia material, discussion prompts, and class activities, students can explore neoliberal globalization, the power of institutions like the WTO and IMF, and the movements that have challenged them– from the 1999 “Battle in Seattle” to grassroots and national mobilizations across the Global south today.
- Foundations of Neoliberalism
- Instructs on the transition from the post-World War II economic order into neoliberalism- from Milton Friedman and the Chicago Boys to “Trickle-Down Economics.” Students explore how neoliberalism reshaped the role of the state, prioritized free markets, deregulation, and austerity, and laid the groundwork for global economic restructuring. It critically examines the contradiction between the promises of prosperity and the lived realities of inequality, deindustrialization, and union decline.
- The Colonial Roots of Globalization and the Global Economy (in progress)
- Connects today’s global economy to the historical legacy of imperialism. It explores how institutions like the IMF and WTO perpetuate neocolonial relationships through debt, trade imbalances, and structural adjustment programs. Students engage with voices such as President Thomas Sankara and Walter Rodney to understand how modern economic “development” often replicates extractive colonial models, while also highlighting contemporary resistance and alternative economic visions.
- 1999 “Battle in Seattle” – Resistance & Reimagining the Global Economy
- Focuses on the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle as a turning point in public awareness and resistance to neoliberal globalization. Students analyze the diverse coalitions that came together—labor unions, environmentalists, Indigenous activists, and human rights defenders—and the tactics they used to disrupt global trade negotiations. By comparing media narratives and engaging with first-hand accounts of the protest, students gain a critical understanding of how everyday people can challenge powerful systems—and why that matters today.
- Beyond Seattle: Super-imperialism and Modern Day Resistance (in progress)
- Focuses on the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle as a turning point in public awareness and resistance to neoliberal globalization. Students analyze the diverse coalitions that came together—labor unions, environmentalists, Indigenous activists, and human rights defenders—and the tactics they used to disrupt global trade negotiations. By comparing media narratives and engaging with first-hand accounts of the protest, students gain a critical understanding of how everyday people can challenge powerful systems—and why that matters today.