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Оглавление2Why Is Global Studies Important?
In recent years a number of scholars have sought to characterize the essential features of global studies scholarship and articulate why the field is so important for understanding our current era (Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Duve 2013; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Sparke 2013; McCarty 2014b; Middell 2014; Steger 2015). Building on these conversations, in the first part of this chapter we list the main reasons why we feel global studies as a field of inquiry is important. Some of these reasons may seem obvious but others not so much, and hence we feel that the list below is a necessary exercise in establishing the value of the global studies enterprise. The points are intended to help scholars communicate why the field is important to students as well as to colleagues in other disciplines, university administrators, funding agencies, and so on.
In the second part of the chapter we list the main characteristics associated with a global studies approach that underscore the breadth and depth of what we identify and depict as global studies scholarship. Together these two lists are meant to help the reader quickly grasp the significance of global studies and its signature characteristics that collectively distinguish it as a new field of inquiry. In later chapters we explore how these characteristics feature in designing, implementing and analyzing global studies research projects (Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
WHY IS GLOBAL STUDIES IMPORTANT?
New Solutions to New Problems
A global studies approach offers new ways of thinking that have the potential to generate solutions to the kinds of global-scale problems that our rapidly globalizing world faces. Pressing issues such as climate change, economic development, regional violence, and resource depletion are among the new issues that call for innovative, perhaps previously unthinkable solutions. Global studies scholar Saskia Sassen, echoing many others in the field, argues that we are currently confronted with “limits in our current master categorizations,” and as a result fail to see beyond what we already recognize and assume to be important. She argues for the need to look for and “detect conceptually subterranean trends that cut across our geopolitical divisions” and open up new ways of seeing, confronting, analyzing, and interpreting the world (Sassen 2014: 8). For example, author and activist Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything connects disparate issues such as climate change, neoliberal market fundamentalism, democratization, and global health to argue for fundamental changes in capitalist societies (Klein 2014). Identifying global-scale issues, finding patterns in and connections between them, and proposing new ways to address these issues are some of the core functions of global studies as a field of inquiry.
New Solutions to Old Problems
In some cases a global studies approach can provide new ways of understanding problems that have been overlooked, ignored, or deliberately avoided. For example, global-historical analyses of the international regulatory system indicate that there may be inherent limitations in the modern international treaty system. The inherent limitations are in part the result of imbalances between powerful countries with economic, political, and military clout that can act unilaterally and smaller countries that cannot. These limitations hinder the development of strong multilateral institutions (e.g., International Criminal Court) and treaties (e.g., Kyoto Accord), effectively destabilizing the geopolitical order and increasing the tendency toward both regional conflict and violence by nonstate actors (e.g., ISIS). By shaking up the way we think about international issues, global approaches have the potential to bring new ways of thinking to old and enduring problems, such as immigration and human trafficking, that are notoriously difficult for nation-states to deal with.
One of the most common limitations in our general understanding of how the world is organized and functions is the nation-state’s taken-for-granted status as the container of political, economic, and cultural activities. But as Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes so compellingly in his book Global Transformations (2003), the nation-state only became accepted as the central political entity around the world in the nineteenth century, with the linguistic spread of languages such as French, English, and German (Anderson 1983; Bhabha 1990). Hence, Trouillot goes on to argue, it is only by appreciating the relatively short history of modern nation-state building that it becomes possible to reconceptualize solutions to old problems:
We are best equipped to assess the changes that typify our times if we approach these changes with a sober awareness that the national state was never as closed and as unavoidable a container—economically, politically, or culturally—as politicians and academics have claimed since the nineteenth century. Once we see the necessity of the national state as a lived fiction of modernity—indeed, as possibly a short parenthesis in human history—we may be less surprised by the changes we now face and may be able to respond to them with the intellectual imagination they deserve. (Trouillot 2003: 85)
Until scholars break out of the anachronistic international relations paradigm that takes nation-states as the core unit of analysis, they cannot begin to identify, integrate, and analyze global structures, systemic forces, and regulatory issues that operate both above and below the level of the nation-state. This is of course not to suggest that nation-states are no longer relevant in our current times, which is patently incorrect. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, many countries across the global south and global north have taken up aggressive reactionary positions and institutionalized laws and policies specifically intended to shore up a national sense of autonomy and independence. Yet despite conservative political rhetoric, harsh immigration laws, and popular, jingoistic nationalism, the role of the nation-state as the central political entity governing the world is profoundly destabilized in our contemporary, post-Westphalian world (Falk 2002; Brown 2014).
Powerful Analytical Tools
A global studies approach offers unique insights and new, powerful analytical capacities. By situating the local-global continuum in deep historical contexts, global studies has the potential to reveal temporal, spatial, and conceptual connections we could not otherwise have seen or even imagined. For instance, it allows us to begin to trace the connections between empires, colonialism, modern imperialism, and new forms of imperialism in the world today. Global studies suggests that important connections exist between events and processes, even when events appear to be disconnected and separated by time, space, or even our own categories of thought.
A global synthesis supports the development of new analytical concepts. Take, for example, the labor, human rights, environmental, and women’s movements. These movements are often studied within the context of a single nation. Even when studied as international social movements, they are typically treated as discrete phenomena. In contrast, a global studies approach would analyze these movements as globally interrelated (Martin 2008). Taking it a step further, a global perspective could link them all together as parts of a larger, antisystemic movement that addresses various facets of inequality and injustice in the global political economy. This understanding could in turn support the formation of entirely new levels of global intersectional solidarity with the potential for large-scale, worldwide change.
Practical and Policy Applications
A global studies approach is important because it offers unique insights into real world problems. For example, in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing analyzes the processes of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication that contribute to deforestation in the rainforests of Indonesia (Tsing 2005). The actors involved in her study include the indigenous people of the region, relocated peasant farmers, environmental activists, legal and illegal loggers, local politicians, government agencies, international scientists, resource speculators and investors, multinational corporations, and UN funding agencies. The “friction” Tsing describes is the result of their collective interactions, their miscommunications, and all that gets lost in translation. In areas where the government of Indonesia lifted logging bans, intending to allow limited legal access, it also enabled the increasing penetration of illegal logging and property rights violations that it could not monitor. The result was dysfunction at the local and national levels that left the rainforests and indigenous people of Indonesia vulnerable to massive overexploitation by global markets.
The policy implications of this kind of functional/dysfunctional analysis are many. For example, one could use this approach to argue that governments that lack resources should avoid making their natural resources available to unfettered exploitation. Where local governments lack the resources to monitor, enforce, restrict, and benefit from the extraction processes that are detrimental to the environment and local populations, they should rely on types of regulation that are easier to enforce, such as banning all drilling, mining, fishing, and hunting in clearly delineated zones until those activities can be properly monitored and controlled.
Studies such as Tsing’s indicate that the insights that result from a global studies approach may be most valuable when deployed at the places where the different political, economic, cultural, and legal elements of global systems interact. By focusing on processes of exchange, and the interactive processes of communication, translation, and interpretation from region to region and from the global to the local, global perspectives can look beyond the nation-state to highlight and interrogate the various functions and dysfunctions within global systems, structures, and institutions. To the degree that geopolitical and economic forces play a part in creating global issues such as mass migration, conflict, climate change, and resource depletion, analyzing larger systems is essential for understanding and acting on these problems.
Global Civics and Citizenship
The field of global studies has the power to transform how both students and more advanced scholars understand current global issues. Every day we are all confronted with headlines that present the world as a dizzying array of apparently disconnected and chaotic events. A global studies approach encourages scholars to identify persistent patterns across time and space. For example, researchers may grapple with the challenge of sustainable economic development. A global studies analysis of economic development may include regional histories of colonization, multinational development policies, national politics, and demographic and environmental changes as well as local institutions, customs, and agricultural practices. In thinking about these multiple elements and perspectives across time and space, scholars are likely to encounter the power and limitations of the modern development paradigm. In a similar way, they can engage with the multiple historical, economic, geopolitical, and cultural factors that shape global issues such as immigration, poverty, regional violence, and ethnic conflict within the context of larger global governance issues such as human rights and global commons. In this way a global studies approach offers scholars a unique, coherent, and more holistic way of understanding ongoing global affairs.
Global perspectives empower scholars and students to understand the world in new ways, as well as to act as citizens of the world (Gaudelli 2016). Teaching the next generation of scholars to reach beyond nationalism to embrace the wider humanity, and encouraging them to think seriously about the possibilities of global citizenship, can transform their fundamental understanding of the individual’s role in society and our collective place in the world.
Critical Thinking
In general terms, critical thinking means a willingness to think openly, challenge one’s own assumptions and concepts, reflect upon the structures of knowledge that guide human actions, and question the implicit bias involved in specific forms of communication. As Michael Scriven and Richard Paul have argued,
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. (Scriven and Paul 1987)
Being a critical thinker is not about being negative or trying to dismantle everything, as some unsophisticated scholars are apt to claim. Rather, being a critical thinker is about refusing to be complacent in the surety of one’s understanding of a problem or concept, and asking new questions in order to both test one’s ideas and seek new ways of knowing and explaining. Critical thinking is taught in many national curricula at the high school level and is viewed as essential to fostering engaged intellectual exchange and reflective contextualization. At the university level, critical thinking lies at the core of pioneering and progressive scholarship, be it in the social sciences, humanities, or physical sciences.
The term critical thinking has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century and is typically associated with neo-Marxist thought and its criticism of the rational actor model fundamental to modern liberal economics. In the twentieth century, critical thinking is associated with the Annales School and Frankfurt School of the interwar period. Members of the Annales School included Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel. Together, these scholars introduced a new historiography that took a more holistic approach in its serious engagement with cultural and social historical analyses of all classes of society, including peasants, farmers, and the poor. The Frankfurt School’s members included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Other important critical thinkers include Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, and Jürgen Habermas, to name a few of the more well known. Many of the members moved to Columbia University in New York to escape the persecution of Nazi Germany. These intellectuals were disillusioned with the ideologies of capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism and sought to understand the structures and mechanisms of class conflict and social inequality. In theoretical terms, they strove to overcome the limitations of established positivist and observation-based thinking, which, they argued, constrained innovative political thought and action.
Today critical theory informs a vast array of theoretical perspectives across the humanities and social sciences, including literary criticism, hermeneutics, semiotics, cultural studies, subaltern studies, world-systems theory, critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and postcolonial theory (Collins 1990). These critical perspectives differ to the degree that they explicitly seek social transformation. That being said, each shares in the quest to interpret social meaning, to expose underlying forms of consciousness and narratives of subjectivity, and to reflect upon the power dynamics between structure and agency (Mulnix 2012). In all of these scholarly endeavors, it is important not to equate critical thinking with moral virtues or some set of predetermined objectives. As Jennifer Wilson Mulnix argues,
Critical thinking, as an intellectual virtue, is not directed at any specific moral ends. That is, it does not intrinsically contain a set of beliefs that are the natural outcomes of applying the method. For instance, two critical thinkers can come to hold contrary beliefs, despite each applying the skills associated with critical thinking well and honestly. As such, critical thinking has little to do with what we think, but everything to do with how we think. (Mulnix 2012: 466)
Within the field of global studies, critical thinking is recognized as an essential element in fostering new questions and new kinds of research applicable to global-scale issues and processes (Appelbaum and Robinson 2005; Juergensmeyer 2011; Lim 2017; Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 147–81). Critical thinking is present in the ways global studies scholarship inter-rogates the logics, categories, ideologies, and assumptions that reinforce hierarchies of power and the status quo. It surfaces in global studies’ commitment to interdisciplinarity and its intrinsic challenge to established disciplinary forms of knowledge. For example, global studies probes the limits of the nation-state and the international relations paradigm, problematizing nationalism and monolithic national identities (Anderson 1983). Global studies also critiques mainstream economics, free-market ideologies, and the assumptions behind economic modernization and development models that center Europe and relegate everyone else to the periphery (Escobar 1995). Critical thinking is further evident in the field’s questioning of new forms of imperialism and structural and institutional modes of discrimination, exploitation, and violence. Global studies hence interrogates concepts such as rationalism, nationalism, secularism, modernity, individualism, liberalism, development, and democracy as well as naturalized categories of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity.
Being critical should not be understood as a destructive or negative impulse, but rather as a constructive and inclusive impulse. Unpacking dominant paradigms is often analytically productive. So while opening up scholarship to multiple and alternative viewpoints can be threatening in that it challenges established truths and ways of understanding, it can also be a creative process, producing new avenues of inquiry and pointing toward new syntheses and solutions (Nederveen Pieterse 2013: 7). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, critical thinking highlights the need for inclusivity in global studies scholarship through promoting the voices of the oppressed, recognizing non-Western epistemologies, and incorporating the global south in the production of new forms of knowledge.
Non-Western Epistemologies and Multiple Voices
The field of global studies reflects a growing scholarly appreciation for the fact that our contemporary world calls for new theoretical, analytical, methodological, and pedagogical approaches. More profoundly, some scholars are now acknowledging that the Euro-American academy may not have all the answers to comprehending and dealing with our increasingly interconnected world. There is a growing recognition that Western paradigms of knowledge may not be able to solve the problems the West has created.
According to ethnic studies scholar George Lipsitz, “New social relations around the world are rapidly producing new social subjects with their own particular archives, imaginaries, epistemologies, and ontologies …. epistemic upheavals require us to rethink fundamental categories about place, time, and knowledge” (Lipsitz 2010: 12–13). Taking a cue from ethnic studies, a global studies approach requires us to reconsider dominant forms of knowledge production and engage with critical voices and plural epistemologies that are not typically represented in Western scholarship and pedagogy (see Freire 2000; Ngũgĩ 1986). Global analyses should include marginalized experiences and voices speaking in non-English vernaculars, many of which may bear witness to the injustices in a global system that includes gross inequality, extreme poverty, human rights abuses, exploitation of human and natural resources, environmental degradation, regionalized violence, and genocide (Lim 2017; McCarty 2014b). Reciprocal intellectual exchanges, bilingual translations, and joint research projects provide avenues for inclusion of different perspectives. It is only by deliberately making room for critical voices and alternative epistemologies, as well as sharing editorial power with non-Western scholars in the production of new knowledge (Smith 2012), that global studies gains the potential to recognize and engage with the many facets of the most serious global issues facing the world today (Featherstone and Venn 2006; Darian-Smith 2014).
Valorizing and legitimating non-Western epistemologies, however, involves much more than either passive moral support or active material support. Western scholars must overcome their ethnocentrism and be prepared to have their own worldviews changed by pluralistic ways of knowing (Santos 2007, 2014). This is very difficult for some scholars in the global north, who remain convinced of their own intellectual superiority. Yet unpacking dominant paradigms should be considered positively, as a creative, constructive, and inclusive process and an opportunity to overcome the “provincial, arrogant, and silly” posturing of Western scholars who assume their work applies to the entire world (Rehbein 2014: 217). More significantly, it is the surest path to surmounting the inherent limitations of Western scholarship, making new, productive avenues of inquiry possible, uncovering new ways of looking at global issues, and leading to more just and sustainable outcomes.
This recognition of the fundamental need to promote, embrace, and learn from people outside the Euro-American worldview builds upon the sociology of knowledge literature, which points to the need to think beyond the nation-state. Michael Burawoy notes that this new interdisciplinary approach “has to be distinguished from economics that is primarily concerned with the advance of market society and political science that is concerned with the state and political order—Northern disciplines ever more preoccupied with modeling a world ever more remote from reality” (Burawoy 2014: xvii). Adding to this conversation, Nour Dados and Raewyn Connell argue that “the epistemological case for a remaking of the social sciences has been firmly established. The great need now is to develop substantive fields of knowledge in a new way, using perspectives from the South and what might be called a postcolonial theoretical sensibility” (Dados and Connell 2014: 195). This requires, declares Boike Rehbein, “not more and not less than a critical theory for the globalized world” (Rehbein 2014: 221).
As critical global studies scholars, we must be highly attuned to the dominance and exclusivity of knowledge produced in the global north. Refusing to embrace and learn from non-Western knowledge aligns us perilously with former colonial eras of oppression and discrimination, where ignorance, arrogance, and the silencing of others ruled the day. We must remain vigilant and curb our universalistic presumptions if we are to avoid replicating, albeit in different ways, the colonial and imperial violence of our Western intellectual forebears (Darian-Smith 2016; Smith 2012; Kovach 2009).
Developing Global Ethics
Kwame Anthony Appiah has written extensively about the idea of a shared global ethic in his influential book Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). As the world becomes ever more complex and interconnected, there is a commensurate need to take global ethics very seriously. Appiah urges us to “learn about people in other places, take an interest in their civilizations, their arguments, their errors, their achievements, not because that will bring us to agreement, but because it will help us get used to one another” (Appiah 2006: 78; see also Beck 2006; Beck and Sznaider 2006).
In the context of global studies, getting used to one another necessarily entails making room at the table for people normally excluded from the processes of knowledge production. It means actively fostering new forms of agency, participation, and expression within the wider contexts of our rapidly shifting geopolitical landscape (Falk 2014). It may even require, as revolutionary black feminist Audre Lorde wrote decades ago, learning how “to make common cause with those identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths” (Lorde 1984: 113). This means explicitly acknowledging that any global process, event, problem, or issue involves a plurality of ethics, and that respecting, learning, and engaging with others from different ethical perspectives is essential in striving to live in a world of peace and mutual support.
CHARACTERISTICS OF GLOBAL STUDIES RESEARCH
There are certain characteristics associated with a global studies approach, some that are unique to the newly emerging field and some that are adapted from various disciplines. We argue that these elements are important for understanding global issues, as well as making the field more coherent, applicable, and accessible to a wide range of scholars irrespective of their intellectual training.
Holistic Approaches
Global studies seeks to recover a holistic approach to analyzing societies and the peoples that constitute them. This means approaching one’s research with the big picture in mind, consciously integrating the political, economic, and sociocultural elements that may not be immediately obvious within a conventional nation-state framing and modernist analytical paradigm. Unfortunately, a holistic approach to studying societies has been in decline within the academy for several decades. It has largely been overwhelmed by the modern rush toward specialization and discrete categories of expert knowledge. The impulse toward holism can still be found within in certain disciplines, such as anthropology, and some interdisciplinary fields, such as social psychology. These disciplines and interdisciplinary fields have long sought to reintegrate that which has been disintegrated by the ever-increasing rationalization of Western society and its educational institutions.
Modern scholars typically approach topics such as economics, politics, culture, and law as singular fields of analysis. Global studies scholars, in contrast, seek to thread apparently discrete phenomena back into the fabric of relations—social, political, economic, historical, and geographic—from which they have been artificially extracted and abstracted (Wolf 1982). What can appear as discrete institutions and realms of productive activity in society are necessarily functioning parts of a whole. Treating such elements as separate, independent units fundamentally misrepresents the interdependence of their functions within the entire social system.
Social structures and functions are not fixed or morally neutral. They endure and provide some level of historical continuity, but they do not entirely prevent change and transformation. They produce and reproduce society, but they also reproduce discrimination and inequality. It is essential to remember that fields like law and health care may seem like distinct areas of value-neutral activity, but in fact they are contested social constructs that cannot be removed from their sociocultural contexts and must always be situated within the fabric of social, political, and economic relations that inevitably involve conflicts over power and self-interest.
The preference for a holistic approach shapes many aspects of global studies scholarship and is the conceptual platform upon which the approach that we present here is built. The drive to present a more holistic picture, or what others have called a “big picture,” can be found in nearly every chapter of this book and in most global studies literature. This holistic impulse is a core principle of the global case study method that we describe in detail in Chapter 6.
Transgressive and Integrative
Thinking holistically, we further argue that global processes and the tools we use to analyze them are essentially transgressive and integrative. By transgressive we mean breaking down boundaries, in the spatial sense of crossing geopolitical boundaries (north/south, south/south, south/east) and in the temporal sense of crossing what are often presented as discrete historical periods (Sachsenmaier 2006; Nederveen Pieterse 2012). This transgressive impulse seeks to go beyond conventional, Eurocentric modes of thinking and violate scholarly conventions that obstruct or reign in attempts to think more inclusively about the world and its complex processes. Transgressing conventional modes of thought and related sensibilities—when done with sensitivity—blurs disciplinary boundaries and many fundamental categories of Enlightenment thinking, presenting opportunities for new modes of intercultural conversation.
By integrative we mean more than an interdisciplinary synthesis: recognizing multiple connections between what are often thought of as discrete social, political, and economic processes, as well as the fundamental interdependence of apparently autonomous phenomena. Combining and coordinating diverse elements into an aggregated whole is not meant to replace one monolithic vision with another monolithic vision. Rather, it is a way of teasing out the synergies, connections, and networks that inform our understanding of any global issue. It means rejecting any dogmatic or singular perspective and deliberately seeking a multiperspectival lens.
Interconnection and Interdependence
Modern Western scholarship seeks to rationalize the study of society and social practices, breaking units of analysis down into ever-finer categories and discrete areas of specialization. In contrast, global studies reintegrates our understanding of the world. It proceeds from the assumption that studying society’s components separately may obscure the massive interconnectivity of all of its parts. Historical and archaeological records indicate that human civilizations have always been interconnected and that it rarely makes sense to separate human history into distinct geographical regions or specific time periods. The ingrained habit of dividing up the study of society into distinct units is one of the main reasons that scholars find it difficult to see the myriad interconnections between the economic, political, legal, and cultural realms of social activity. In an increasingly globalized world, whenever and wherever we look for connections we find that apparently discrete elements are interdependent and mutually constitutive.
Analyzing interconnections and interdependence is not a purely theoretical exercise and has important practical applications. For example, global studies shows us that the more policy makers underestimate the structural interconnectedness of related global issues, the more likely it is that their policies and programs will have fewer predictable outcomes and more unintended consequences. The multiplication of unintended consequences has real-world implications for international development programs and many other public policies.
Engaging the holistic, transgressive, and interdependent qualities of global issues may at first make the world appear disorganized and chaotic. Disrupting established ways of knowing, however, has the potential to yield new understandings and analyses. Take, for example, global issues such as poverty, growing urban slums, and terrorism. Recent increases in all three indicate that these apparently discrete phenomena may be interactive elements in a larger global system (Kaldor 2006; Davis 2006).
Global-Scale Issues and the Local-Global Continuum
At first glance, global studies may seem to focus on large economic, political, and social processes that are truly global in scale. Issues such as economic development, climate change, resource depletion, regional conflict, human rights, and immigration all have at least one thing in common: they reach beyond the limits of the nation-state even when they are articulated primarily as nationalist projects or concerns. These issues are global in scale in the sense that they ignore political boundaries and have an impact on all nations, albeit to varying degrees. Up until relatively recently the largest unit of analysis was the nation-state, which made it difficult for scholars to see the larger, integrated world system within which various state and nonstate actors operate. As a starting point, global perspectives enable global systemic analyses that are not limited to a national/international frame.
As we discuss in Chapter 1, “global-scale” doesn’t simply mean “big.” It does not mean that global scholars only study macroscale processes or that they need to “study everything and everywhere” (Duve 2013: 23). Building on the work of human geographers in the 1980s and 1990s, global scholars see local places as historically contingent and embedded within and refracted through global processes (Pred 1984; Massey 1994; Swyngedouw 1997; see Giddens 1984 on structuration). So while global-scale issues may have macroscale dimensions, they also have localized manifestations. For global studies scholars, global-scale issues require a shift of focus not just from the national to the global, but from the national to the entire local-global continuum (Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Darian-Smith 2014). Further, global studies scholars argue that these kinds of global-scale issues can manifest simultaneously at multiple levels and that they often manifest differently at regional, national, and local levels. In this sense the local, national, regional, and global are better understood as embedded sets of relations: inseparable and continually creating and re-creating each other.
Global studies scholars see the local and the global as two sides of the same coin, but without essentializing these two faces or viewing them as static or fixed. Global studies scholars are thus attentive to the ways in which global-scale processes become manifest in the lives of ordinary people and across the full range of human activities. Writes Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Any kind of research with a decidedly global perspective will also have to find ways to balance the universal and the particular. It has to be sensitive to both the inner diversity of global structures and the global dimension of many local forces” (Sachsenmaier 2006: 455). Hence, depending on the questions a researcher asks, the global can be found in large cities, but also in villages and neighborhoods. The global can be found in multinational corporations, but also in the workplace. It can be found in mass cultural icons and the symbolic rituals of daily life, in grand historical narratives and individual life stories (McCarty 2014b; Sassen 2011; Roy and Ong 2011; Juergensmeyer, Griego, and Soboslai 2015). The ability to grasp global-scale issues, to integrate larger global systems analysis into a multilevel analysis of the entire local-global spectrum, and to see the global through the local and vice versa give global studies a unique spatial and conceptually relational framing.
Built into this understanding of global-scale issues is the recognition that new geopolitical spatial dynamics are not restrained by a conventional nation-state framing. Importantly, this does not mean that global studies only engages with social, cultural, political, economic, and legal issues “beyond the state,” as introductory texts to global studies commonly argue. We think this is a rather simplistic understanding of what characterizes an issue or process as “global,” and it bogs down conversations in definitional technicalities about geospatial reach. In contrast, we suggest that a more productive line of inquiry results from perceiving global-scale issues across a local-global continuum. A local-global continuum is not a series of spatial containers vertically nested from the local, through the national, up to the global. Rather, it is a more distributed, decentralized, and deterritorialized understanding of overlapping and mutually constitutive geopolitical and conceptual sites and arenas.
One conceptual difficulty in dealing with global-scale issues is that in some cases they vary so greatly across local cultural contexts that it may challenge the definition of abstract Western concepts such as human rights, development, and justice and their assumed universality (Chakrabarty 2000: 9; Merry 2006). Nonetheless, global-scale issues necessarily link large analytical abstractions to their varied local manifestations. This ability to integrate larger global systems analysis into a multilevel and multidimensional analysis of the entire local-global spectrum and to identify impulses of influence in this mutually constitutive network is a new way of understanding the world. And it raises new research questions and a conceptually accessible methodology that is not grounded in any one particular discipline (which we discuss in more detail in Chapter 5).
We argue that what makes any subject matter global is for the researcher to ask questions and employ methods that explore interconnections across past and present, across disciplines and analytical frames, and across substantive issues that have been limited in their conceptualization by a focus on the nation-state (Darian-Smith 2013a, 2013b). Hence, across the social sciences and humanities more and more scholars are becoming attuned to the global dimensions present in their research, dimensions that are refracted through a global imaginary, even when their research is on the surface nationally or locally framed. The more scholars in different disciplines look for global dimensions in their work, the more they find. As we discuss more fully in Chapter 6 with respect to a global case study, this is because processes of globalization do not just occur beyond the nation-state but manifest at various spatial, temporal, and conceptual scales within, across, and between conventional national orientations.
Decentered, Distributed, and Deterritorialized Processes
Global issues are not only large and complex, but, like the Internet, they can also be decentralized and distributed across times and spaces. They tend to have a deterritorialized quality: they are everywhere and nowhere, or at least not neatly contained within established political borders and natural boundaries in the ways to which we are accustomed (fig. 6). They may have more than one center or no center at all (Baran 1964; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; McCarty 2014a).
Figure 6. Centralized, Decentralized, and Distributed Systems.
Global issues may also have no hierarchy, directional flow, or even clear linear causality (McCarty 2014b: 3). As a result global processes may have multiple centers and peripheries within, beyond, and across national lines. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse argues in his article “What Is Global Studies?,” we need a “multicentric” approach that more closely examines new hubs of power, connectivity, and exchange and takes into account “concerns not just from New York, London, Paris or Tokyo, but also from the viewpoint of New Delhi, Sao Paulo, Beijing or Nairobi” (Nederveen Pieterse 2013: 10). Boike Rehbein adds that in a multicentric world, “the peripheries have entered the centers (and vice versa), while dominant and dominated are not homogenous groups” (Rehbein 2014: 217).
The issue of immigration provides a pertinent example of distributed and deterritorialized processes. Immigration, transmigration, and return migration have become so widespread and complex that immigration can no longer be said to have a clear directional flow from one point to another—from the global south to the global north or vice versa. The sense of violation that accompanies the massive dislocation and cross-migration of people fleeing poverty and war is not limited to one nation or another. This problem affects the borders of all nations, and the crisis is felt simultaneously—although to different degrees—all over the world. The Third World is no longer somewhere “out there,” safely far off, as it may once have seemed to those living in the First World. Of course, this is also true for the global south, which has had to deal with both the positive and negative impacts of Western capitalism’s infiltration (see Prashad 2012).
The point-to-point model of immigration fails to adequately describe the complex flow of people around the world. From a global perspective, the ebb and flow of immigrants over the last two hundred years has been closely tied to the flow of global capital through a global economy. Where global-scale issues such as immigration are driven by global-scale economic and political processes, these issues tend to defy geographic and political boundaries. This makes it difficult to study global-scale issues using territorial categories such as the nation-state. It follows that the data sets that nation-states collect are also territorially bound and essentially flawed for a global analysis. If immigration is a distributed issue driven by decentralized global-scale processes, then it is no wonder that national immigration policies based on flawed, nation-bound understandings of immigration fail to adequately deal with the issue.
Historical Contextualization
Global studies scholars recognize that history matters and that what went before explains a great deal about the world today (Mintz 1985; Hobsbawm 1997). It is impossible to understand the current geopolitical map and multiple conflicts without some understanding of the colonial and imperial histories that established modern national boundaries and set up enduring ethnic and territorial tensions. In short, a complex, interconnected, and globalizing present can only be understood in the context of a complex, interconnected, and globalizing past.
Take, for example, terrorism. In some ways the kinds of terrorism we see today are completely new, yet terrorism as a political tool has existed for centuries. By inserting contemporary terrorism into historical contexts, we can see that while terrorists might claim religious motivations, acts of terrorism are also political and cultural acts (Juergensmeyer 2000, 2001). Reinserting global processes into historical contexts allows us to reconnect the dots and make sense of what may otherwise appear to be discrete phenomena and random events. Global analyses look for patterns of both change and continuity, highlighting the deep historical continuities between the past and ongoing global processes (McCarty 2014b).
It is important to note, moreover, that histories are always plural. Global histories should be decentralized and not privilege one historical narrative over another. One community’s understanding of the past must be situated against other peoples’ narratives and historical memories, which may be contradictory or even oppositional (Trouillot 1995). It is not sufficient to tell a singular or dominant Eurocentric understanding of history. Further, it is not sufficient for us in the Euro-American academy to tell the histories of others as if we knew better or had a more sophisticated understanding of what really took place. A global historical perspective recognizes that each society and people has its own unique understanding of the past, and that these various social understandings inform each other in dynamic interplay across time and geopolitical space.
Sachsenmaier writes that new directions in global history suggest that history as a discipline “can contribute significantly to the study of globalization and to the struggles to establish global paradigms of thinking” (Sachsenmaier 2006: 465).1 He goes on to remark:
Now that scholars have begun to pursue global agendas while remaining sensitive to the full complexity of the local, the devil is in the detail. Or, seen from another perspective, the treasure trove is in the detail. In lieu of a detached macro-theoretical synthesis, the relationship between the global and the local will need to be explored through a myriad of detailed studies … Global and transcultural history can be at the very forefront of such an endeavor. (Sachsenmaier 2006: 461)
For global scholars the historical/temporal dimension includes historical narratives as well as different conceptions of time itself. Not only do different cultures have different understandings of time (Ogle 2015), but global processes often occur on time horizons that are not recognized by fast-paced modern societies and the dominant global political framework (Hutchings 2008; Lundborg 2012). For example, some forms of environmental damage, such as leaching of toxins into water catchment areas, can be lethal to local residents. This kind of ecocide, however, is not classified as criminal violence in modern legal systems in part because the damage may occur over decades and generations (Nixon 2013). The slow pace of processes such as climate change, ocean pollution, and habitat destruction present unique regulatory challenges. The short time cycles associated with media, politics, and public attention make it difficult to develop multidecade strategies and implement long-term policies.
Global Social Structures
It is not an exaggeration to say that the concept of social structure was the cornerstone on which the modern social and behavioral disciplines were built. The founding fathers of social theory, including Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sigmund Freud, each contributed their own systemic or structural theories of society. This is one of the main reasons their contributions remain influential to this day.
The ability to see beyond individual behavior to identify enduring patterns in society that constrain this behavior is perhaps the singular skill of a social scientist. This skill is analogous to what C. Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination” (Mills 1959). It is the ability to see that the individual’s free choices, called individual agency, are actually constrained or influenced by a myriad of preexisting conditions, norms, values, institutions, and structural relations. How an individual acts is hugely influenced by language, culture, nationality, legal system, age, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, family, education, geographic region, and so on. These social factors thoroughly shape individual “free” choices—choices such as whom to marry, what job to take, or what kind of transportation to use. The influence of social structures is such that the outcomes of individual “free” choices become overwhelmingly, statistically, and distressingly predictable.
Recognizing that individual agency is constrained by social structures also almost inevitably leads to the recognition that social systems are not value neutral. Social and economic systems function, but the existing systems function better for some people than for others. With the recognition of social structure comes the realization that inequality is not a natural or random occurrence. Inequality is socially structured, determined by preexisting patterns, norms, and institutions of society. Structural and critical thinking are hence very closely linked.
The concept of social structure remains crucial to understanding global issues. We argue, however, that there is a need to revisit the notion of social structure and expand it beyond the modern nation-state and single-society paradigm in which it was developed. We need to rework the concept of social structure so that it can be applied to larger geopolitical economic structures and their varied impacts around the world. This kind of global political economic approach focuses our attention on the structural features of the current world order, highlighting the enduring political and economic inequalities within and between states and a variety of nonstate actors.
Breaking Down Binaries
Increasing levels of communication, integration, and interdependence in the global system require us to complicate simple binaries such as East/West, colonizer/colonized, First World/Third World, and developed/developing. Such binaries can be used effectively to emphasize inequality and injustices between continents and regions of the world. These same binaries, however, also obscure the complexity of global issues. We may talk of rich and poor countries, but only a handful of countries are unequivocally rich or poor; the large majority of them fall somewhere in between. Dichotomies such as rich/poor obscure variations between countries, as well as internal variations within each country. Even the poorest countries have wealthy elite, middle, and working classes. Conversely, even the richest regions have poverty and inequality. Moreover, assuming the conventions of a global north/global south divide may preclude us from recognizing a multitude of relations that can be characterized as south/south or south/east (Roy and Crane 2015). These new binaries are themselves problematic in their monolithic essentializing of human difference, yet they are important for shaking up modernist conventions of how to view the world in which “the West versus the rest” has prevailed for centuries.
Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-systems approach is a good example of systemic thinking that moved beyond nation-states and simplified binaries (Wallerstein 1974). Even though Wallerstein’s core/semiperiphery/periphery model is often used as if it were a simple triad, this is not an accurate portrayal of his work. Wallerstein described a complex global system made up of distributed systemic processes that are deterritorialized in the sense that they can exist side-by-side in the same place. In his approach, core and periphery are the two ends of a spectrum. Along this spectrum some nations have more diversified economies and more total core processes than other nations. It is important to note that in his model this spectrum could also be applied to subnational regions. Within every nation there are subregions made up of predominantly core, semiperipheral, or peripheral processes. “Global cities,” for example, can be understood as core areas containing many diverse core, semiperipheral, and peripheral processes, and these cities are in some ways more closely linked to each other than to the peripheral, rural areas that surround them (Sassen 1991).
One must always be careful when applying Western binary logics and abstractions to non-Western regions. As the world becomes more globalized, the lines between East and West, First World and Third World, and global north and global south are increasingly blurred. These analytical conventions should be treated with care so as to avoid replicating categories of thought associated with modern imperialism and colonialism. The people and issues that Europeans historically positioned “out there” at the margins are now right next door, and vice versa. At the same time, while it has always been appropriate, only recently have scholars recognized the need to apply developmental and human rights paradigms to postindustrial societies. In global studies and across the humanities and social sciences more generally, scholars should avoid using binary logics that oversimplify and obscure variation and inadvertently perpetuate a singular worldview. We should continually work to develop new terminology that more accurately reflects a wider range of diversity and variation across a continuum.
Hybridity and Fluidity
In addition to a strong preference for binaries, Western scholarship has a particular fondness for fixed categorical distinctions. It assumes that categories such as race, ethnicity, class, gender, or nationality accurately describe people’s identities and how people classify themselves. The implicit assumption behind these kinds of schemas is that they are both comprehensive and mutually exclusive. But such categories have many overlapping variations and are never truly fixed, stable, or complete.
Categories are assumed to be mutually exclusive when a person cannot fit into more than one category. With increasing immigration and a better understanding of the deep histories of human movement, it is clear that our tidy racial and ethnic categories are overly simplistic and essentializing. Similarly, national identities have become complex, hyphenated, and multiple. There have always been groups that don’t fit neatly into the available categories, and globalization is making it increasingly difficult to ignore the limitations of nation-states’ categorical schemata. As Nederveen Pieterse argues, “We have been so trained and indoctrinated to think of culture in territorial packages of assorted ‘imagined communities’ that to seriously address the windows opened and questions raised by hybridization in effect requires a decolonization of imagination” (Nederveen Pieterse 2009: 57).
Developing new terminology that more accurately reflects the range of possible identities in a globalized world is not sufficient. Any new understanding of hybrid identities also needs to take into account the transient nature of identity production itself. People have the ability to take on different identities in different social settings. People in hybrid racial, ethnic, and national categories can shift back and forth between categories, or occupy their hybrid identities, depending on the context. According to Zygmunt Bauman, “if the modern ‘problem of identity’ is how to construct an identity and keep it solid and stable, the postmodern ‘problem of identity’ is primarily how to avoid fixation and keep the options open” (Bauman 1996: 18; see Darian-Smith 2015). This kind of fluidity indicates that scholars need to increase the range of variation of their conceptual frames, making allowances for overlapping categories as well as movement between categories that in turn may alter the essentialized construct of the category itself.
GLOBAL STUDIES AS OPPORTUNITY
The inclusive nature of global studies as a field enables scholars to be interested in a wide range of substantive topics. These include, but are not limited to, human rights and global governance; human trafficking, sex trade, and slavery; conflict, violence, terrorism, and genocide; crime, security, and policing; poverty and inequality; economic and community development; global cities and urban slums; global markets and regional trade agreements; fair trade and supply chain issues; labor, sweatshops, and workers’ rights; the environment, natural resources, and the global commons; energy and sustainability; global social movements, women’s movements, and microfinance; food systems, food security, and traditional agriculture; humanitarian aid and disaster relief; philanthropy; immigration, diaspora, refugees, and asylum; global health, pandemics, nutrition, and epidemiology; education and transnational knowledge production; religions and religious nationalisms; and science, technology, and media (see Anheier and Juergensmeyer 2012).
In addition to engaging with their own substantive research, many global scholars are active on their campuses developing exciting new curricula, making connections with scholars in other disciplines, and building institutional support for innovative interdisciplinary collaborations. Beyond the campus, they engage with their communities as global citizens, public intellectuals, and activist scholars. They often have enduring interests in world affairs, intercultural exchanges, and the promotion of intercultural understanding. Many also nurture this kind of global citizenship among their students by mentoring students and encouraging them to participate in study abroad, language programs, and field research, and to respect other cultures and historical traditions.
The point is that as a global scholar you can take your research in nearly any direction and engage with nearly any combination of global issues. Moreover, each global topic is deeply complex and no one scholar, or even group of scholars, can possibly hope to master any one of them fully. So we end up with the question with which we began Chapter 1: How does one begin the formidable task of doing global research? Our argument in this chapter and throughout this book is that rather than going in infinite directions and being totally overwhelmed, it is possible to do global studies research in an orderly and manageable way. Our overall goal is to convince the reader that doing global research can be enormously rewarding and well worth the time, energy, and challenge. More profoundly, contemporary researchers cannot afford to sit back and fail to engage with historical and contemporary global processes if their work is to remain relevant and applicable to the academy.
As a critical new field of inquiry, global studies stands poised to help dislodge the global north’s epistemological universalism. To put it another way, global studies has the potential to become the intellectual platform upon which scholars forge theoretical and methodological contributions that decolonize Western expertise. Global research may seem formidable, but we view it as an extraordinary opportunity to shape new modes of inquiry that are of the utmost imperative to every one of us living in an increasingly interconnected world.
