This period also saw a return to ultranationalism, racism, xenophobia, and anti-immigrant hysteria (Brown 2014).
In the post–Cold War era, scholars in various disciplines were trying to understand globalization and the “intensification of worldwide social relations” (Giddens 1990: 64; Robertson 1992; Axford 1995; Castells 1996; Friedman 1999; Stiglitz 2002). There were heated debates about the definition of globalization and how best to describe and analyze it (Steger and James 2014). Since the 1990s scholars have split into three main camps: the so-called “hyperglobalists,” “skeptics,” and “transformationalists” (Held et al. 1999: 2–10; Ferguson and Mansbach 2012:17–26). The diverse opinions about the nature of globalization that characterize each of these camps reflect the expertise and training of individual scholars from across the social sciences and, to a lesser degree, the humanities. In general terms, hyperglobalists focus on the economy, arguing that since the Cold War the world has experienced unprecedented levels of integration and a new form of global capitalism that have profoundly changed its organization and how it is experienced. Skeptics argue against this position, stating that economic internationalism occurred to the same degree in the nineteenth century and that contemporary economic expansion does not represent an entirely new era or reflect real historical change. Skeptics also assert that global phenomena do not have a worldwide reach, as hyperglobalists claim, and are in fact only regional—e.g., European, East Asian—in geospatial terms.
Transformationalists, or what Luke Martell calls the “third wave” of globalization theorists, stress the interconnections between economics, politics, society, and culture (Martell 2007). Over the years, tranformationalists have presented more nuanced, multilinear, and multicausal analyses of global processes than the hyperglobalists or skeptics. In part this is a result of the global north now experiencing many of the devastating impacts of neoliberalism that it exacted for decades on the global south, as the plummeting social and political circumstances of Greece, Spain, and other European countries have shown. Transformationalists agree that the world is currently undergoing massive change, but the precise nature of that change is still very much in question.
FROM GLOBALIZATION TO GLOBAL STUDIES
Against the backdrop of scholarly debate about the various meanings and impacts of globalization, global studies emerged as a new field of inquiry that broadened the focus beyond economic forms of globalization. The first global studies programs were established in the late 1990s, and over the last twenty years stand-alone programs and research hubs have flourished in numerous countries including Australia, China, Denmark, Germany, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Each of these programs developed within specific institutional and cultural contexts and as a consequence has its own unique intellectual profile (Juergensmeyer 2014b; Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 25–52; Loeke and Middell forthcoming). Alongside these interdisciplinary programs dedicated to global studies, subdisciplinary fields that engage specifically with global issues—e.g., global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies—have also emerged within conventional disciplines (see fig. 4). In short, the field of global studies, and its various institutional and disciplinary manifestations, has grown rapidly, and there is now burgeoning institutional support for global scholarship at leading universities.2
Figure 4. Disciplines Engaging Globalization.
Many of the early global studies programs, particularly those in the United States and United Kingdom, emphasized macro processes of economic globalization and international institutions that reflected international relations/international studies scholarship. Alongside this trend, other global studies programs stressed a more humanistic approach and focused on global history, postcolonial studies, cultural diversity, and intercultural exchange. For example, the world and global history approaches at the University of Leipzig laid the groundwork for what is now the Global and European Studies Institute (GESI). Another example is the Globalism Institute (now Centre for Global Research) at RMIT in Melbourne, Australia, which from its inauguration paid particular attention to global political and economic transformations and related political theory (see Steger and Wahlrab 2016: 41–47). One of the pioneering programs was the Department of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, founded in 1999. From the start this program included an interdisciplinary curriculum and faculty from both the humanities and social sciences.3
Today, among the many global studies programs around the world, there is a concerted effort to develop a more inclusive curriculum that increasingly promotes socially engaged research as well as historical and qualitative methods in an effort to foster culturally informed knowledge production (see, for instance, Appelbaum and Robinson 2005; Khagram and Levitt 2008; Amar 2013). Drawing on a broad range of scholarship, including anthropology, comparative literature, critical race studies, economics, ethnic studies, feminist studies, geography, history, law, linguistics, philosophy, religious studies, sociology, and subaltern studies, a global studies approach highlights the need to rethink our analytical concepts, methods, and approaches to ask new questions about globally integrated processes and dependencies (see fig. 5).
Figure 5. Global Studies.
As you would expect, because global scholars borrow elements from conventional disciplines, global studies is impacted by and, over time, may have some impact on those disciplines. But in general interdisciplinary scholars can never entirely satisfy scholars that are deeply entrenched in conventional disciplines. For example, global research often engages with history. Historical context is a necessary dimension to understanding global issues. For the global scholar, history—or economics, geography, linguistics, or any of the other disciplines—informs one of the many dimensions relevant to global analysis (compare fig. 5 to fig. 12 in Chapter 6). Global scholars draw upon disciplinary perspectives and methods selectively, as needed, to understand multifaceted issues. As an interdisciplinary project, however, global scholarship cannot be entirely contained within disciplines.
Developing a unique interdisciplinary global studies curriculum poses specific challenges that echo the history of the then new women’s studies departments of the 1970s. At that time, scholars working in traditional disciplines added feminist content to their regular classes in an attempt to mainstream women, sexuality, and feminist issues more generally. Bonnie Smith, professor of history and women’s studies at Rutgers University, recounts, “At the beginning, Women’s Studies came to offer a cafeteria-like array of disciplinary investigations of the past and present conditions under which women experienced, acted, and reflected upon the world” (Smith 2013: 4). Over the decades, however, women’s studies converged into a comprehensive field with its own unique curriculum and an expansive array of scholarly inquiries that ranged well beyond the initial scholarly focus on women. Smith notes:
From the beginning Women’s Studies engaged the entire university population. It usually brought in those who were the most intellectually adventurous, whether the course took place in Seoul, South Korea or Los Angeles, US. In short, Women’s Studies is a global scholarly enterprise with sparks of energy crossing the disciplines and uniting communities of students and teachers. All this makes Women’s Studies a vastly exciting and innovative program of study. (Smith 2013: 4)
Conventional disciplines are mainstreaming the study of global issues within regular courses in a similar fashion. As noted above, today there exist a range of subdisciplinary fields such as global history, global literature, global sociology, and global legal studies. But this cafeteria-like smorgasbord of course offerings that are grounded in specific disciplinary theory and methods is quite different from the distinct interdisciplinary global studies curriculum
