simply a matter of spatial scale or geopolitical reach that makes any issue or process global. “Global” doesn’t just mean “big.” The local and global are mutually constitutive, creating and recreating each other across conceptual fields in a constant dynamic. This means that the global is found not only in macro processes but also in the full range of human activities. We don’t find global processes only in large cosmopolitan cities and multinational corporations, but also in villages and neighborhoods, workplaces and private homes. Our argument is that the global is present where global-scale processes become manifest in real-world contexts, in the lives of ordinary people. Put another way, what makes an issue or process global are the questions one asks that reveal its global dimensions, even if on the surface it appears very small scale and localized (Darian-Smith 2013a; Eslava 2015). One implication of this is that scholars that do not think of their work as “global” can reconceptualize their current projects as global research by asking the kinds of questions that engage a global perspective.
A global perspective involves more than a view of geopolitical scales and jurisdictional levels nested from the local or small scale up through the levels of the national, regional, international, transnational, and global (Sassen 1991; Brenner 2004; Darian-Smith 2013c). The vertical nesting hierarchy of spatial scale has been the dominant way of thinking about political and economic relations between individuals, nation-states, and the international order for decades. This hierarchical way of thinking is often linked with the writings of the American international relations specialist Kenneth N. Waltz, who delineated three levels—systemic/international, national/regional, and individual/local—in his book Man, the State, and War (1959).
While this vertical nesting hierarchy provides a neat analytical shorthand for what we are exploring, it is conceptually and materially inadequate (Howitt 1993; Brenner 2001). Rather, a global perspective involves a new conceptualization of practices within a global imaginary. This entails, as global studies scholar Saskia Sassen argues, new assemblages of authority and power that do not privilege one spatial orientation over another (Sassen 2008). Depending on the questions one asks and the issues one is engaged with, the local may occupy the foreground and in fact eclipse the global in terms of analytical and methodological priority and material significance (fig. 1). This recasting of social, economic, political, legal, social, and cultural relations creates opportunities to rethink conventional linear notions of cause and effect since we cannot assume automatically that the issues with the most encompassing geospatial reach will have the biggest impact. Such rethinking disrupts our instrumentalist view of economic, political, and social processes, which in most scholarship still emanate primarily from the nation-state and are interpreted as making an impact up and down a vertical axis of substate, nation-state, and transstate relations.
Figure 1. Overlapping Assemblages and Relations across Time and Space.
As global scholars, we think it is essential to be flexible thinkers and interrogate our taken-for-granted assumptions about the workings of power and related social, legal, economic, and political concepts. In short, we need to decolonize the basic building blocks that have dominated the past three centuries of Western thought (Santos 2007, 2014; Mutua and Swadener 2011). As global scholars, we should be careful not to reify or unduly privilege the nation-state by viewing everything as operating either above or below its framing parameters. In other words, we need to analytically decenter the nation-state despite some states remaining very powerful actors. And as global scholars, we want to suggest that it is entirely appropriate, if not imperative, to foreground people living within local and intimate communities. This does not mean that the local is somehow intrinsically good or a more important arena of study, but analyses of global processes should always take into account the people and communities who ultimately feel the impact of those processes even when impacts are unintended or unforeseen. We should be anxious to explore the global dimensions of the local and how local forces may be both resisting and reconstituting national contexts (fig. 2).
Figure 2. Conceptual Imaginaries.
Perhaps most important, as global scholars we should embrace a global imaginary without naïvely believing—as was the case in the post–World War II era—in Western industrialized states as the driving force and only source of emancipatory possibility. This means recognizing alternative, non-Western epistemologies and pluralist political, legal, and economic systems, and promoting—as the World Social Forum seeks to do—how another world may be possible (Santos 2007). As Toni Morrison reminded us years ago, embracing the imagination of another can be one way of sharing the world (Morrison 1992). Adopting a global imaginary means appreciating that what happens in one part of the world affects and influences what happens in other parts of the world. Aspirations of global democracy necessarily involve “us” and “them” because another person’s insecurity is only a few steps removed from our own. Finally, as global scholars, adopting a global imaginary means understanding the overlapping and intersecting social contexts across times and spaces in which all of our work is situated. This is the case whether one’s primary research is engaged with family relations, local communities, global cities, national governments, multinational corporations, international agencies, or global governance institutions. Depending on the research questions one asks, all or some of these dimensions may be in play, in some cases simultaneously.
DECENTERING THE PRODUCTION OF KNOWLEDGE
The current challenges presented by our complex world require global scholars to embrace new ways of thinking. We argue that decentering is an important way of thinking about global challenges. To “decenter” something means to displace it from a primary place, from a central position or role, or from an established center of focus. French philosopher Louis Althusser introduced the idea of a “decentered structure” to structural theory (Althusser 1990: 254–55). Jean Piaget used the idea in his theory of cognitive development. In his work, decentering refers to the stage of cognitive development when a child relinquishes an egocentric world for a more objective world shared with others, and develops the ability to logically consider multiple aspects of a situation (Silverman 1980: 106). In social theory, decentering can mean “to disconnect from practical or theoretical assumptions of origin, priority, or essence” (Merriam-Webster 2015).
The decentering theme will be used in several ways in this book. For example we argue, as others before have argued, that Euro-American scholars need to decenter Western conceptions of history. Further, we argue that to engage with global issues, Western scholars need to decenter the fundamentally modernist and rationalist imperatives to categorize and dichotomize what are essentially decentered social processes. Scholars need to recognize and overcome prevailing logics that put everything into hierarchies, ordered positions, center and periphery models, and developmental progressions with directional flows and linear causalities that start at an origin point and evolve in one direction.
Embracing a decentered world and learning to consider it from multiple perspectives implies a decentering of the production of knowledge that has been, at least for the past four centuries, historically associated with the rise of modernity that emerged out of Western Europe and through processes of colonialism, industrialization, and imperialism spread around the world. Today the Euro-American academy still dominates the production of scholarly knowledge, in part by ignoring long-standing and rapidly growing bodies of non-Western scholarship. There is a pressing need for research dealing with global issues to incorporate knowledge produced outside the Euro-American academy, and to understand this scholarship as a vital source of inspiration and innovation (Comaroff and Comaroff 2012; Grosfoguel 2011; Keim et al, 2014). As Australian and US scholars ourselves, we have to constantly deal with this issue. We have found that there are a number of ways to engage scholarship in other languages and cultures. Scholars can read translated works, have their own work translated,
