Following the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, terrorism has joined economic restructuring, climate change, environmental degradation, and the AIDS pandemic as another issue warranting 'global' attention. The contributors to this book explore the nexus of power and space behind this rescaling of contemporary social, economic, and political life.

The book opens with an introductory essay by the editors, outlining some of the main themes that have arisen in discussions about geographical scale to date. The contributors then consider in more detail key questions about how our world is scaled, how we think about such scaling, and how social actors - whether terrorists, environmentalists, or corporate executives - go about scaling their activities in ways that allow them to exercise power or deny it to others.

This timely book will stimulate readers to find new ways to define the terms and spaces of political struggle open to them.

Andrew Herod is Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia. He is the author of Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (2001), editor of Organizing the Landscape: Geographical Perspectives on Labor Unionism (1998), and co-editor of An Unruly World? Globalization, Governance and Geography (1998).

Melissa W. Wright is Assistant Professor of Geography and Women's Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. She has published articles in Environment and Planning A, Antipode, Public Culture, Cultural Anthropology, Social Text, and Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.