THINKING GLOBALLY
THINKING GLOBALLY A Global Studies Reader
EDITED BY
Mark Juergensmeyer
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
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Thinking globally : a global studies reader / edited by Mark Juergensmeyer.
pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-27844-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN 9780520958012 1. Globalization—Textbooks. I. Juergensmeyer, Mark.
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CONTENTS
Preface: A Friendly Introduction to Global Studies
PART I: INTRODUCTION
1. Thinking Globally What is globalization and how do we make sense of it?
Manfred Steger, “Globalization: A Contested Concept” from Globalization: A Very Short Introduction
Thomas Friedman, “The World Is Ten Years Old” from The Lexus and the Olive Tree
Paul James, “Approaches to Globalization” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Steven Weber, “How Globalization Went Bad” from Foreign Policy
Further Reading
2. Globalization over Time Globalization has a history: the current global era is prefaced by periods of economic interaction, social expansion, and intense cultural encounters
William McNeill, “Globalization: Long Term Process or New Era in Human Affairs?” from New Global Studies
Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Imperial Trajectories” from Empires in World History
Immanuel Wallerstein, “On the Study of Social Change” from The Modern World System
Dominic Sachsenmaier, “Movements and Patterns: Environments of Global History” from Global Perspectives on Global History
Further Reading
PART II: THE MARCH OF GLOBALIZATION, BY REGION
3. Africa: The Rise of Ethnic Politics in a Global World The impact of the slave trade and colonialization on Africa, influence of African culture on the Americas, and African aspects of the global rise of ethnic politics
Nayan Chanda, “The Hidden Story of a Journey” from Bound Together
Dilip Hiro, “Slavery” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Jeffrey Haynes, “African Diaspora Religions” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Jacob K. Olupona, “Thinking Globally about African Religion” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions
Okwudiba Nnoli, “The Cycle of ‘State-Ethnicity-State’ in African Politics” from MOST Ethno-Net Africa
Further Reading
4. The Middle East: Religious Politics and Antiglobalization The rise of global religious cultures from the Middle East, and current religious politics as part of a global challenge to secularism
Mohammed Bamyeh, “The Ideology of the Horizons” from The Social Origins of Islam
Said Amir Arjomand, “Thinking Globally about Islam” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions
Jonathan Fox, “Are Middle East Conflicts More Religious?” from Middle East Quarterly
Barah Mikaïl, “Religion and Politics in Arab Transitions” from FRIDE policy brief
Further Reading
5. South and Central Asia: Global Labor and Asian Culture The spread of Asian cultures from India and Central Asia via trade routes; the role of South Asia in global trade and information technology
Richard Foltz, “Religions of the Silk Road” from Religions of the Silk Road
Morris Rossabi, “The Early Mongols” from Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times
Vasudha Narayanan, “Hinduism” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Barbara D. Metcalf and Thomas R. Metcalf, “Revolt, the Modern State, and Colonized Subjects, 1848–1885” from A Concise History of India
Carol Upadhya and A.R. Vasavi, “Outposts of the Global Information Economy” from In an Outpost of the Global Economy: Work and Workers in India’s Technology Industry
Further Reading
6. East Asia: Global Economic Empires The role of East Asia in global economic history, and the rise of new economies in China, Japan, and South Korea based on global trade
Kenneth Pomeranz, “The Great Divergence” from The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy
Andre Gunder Frank, “The 21st Century Will Be Asian” from The Nikkei Weekly
Steven Radelat, Jeffrey Sachs, and Jong-Wha Lee, “Economic Growth in Asia” from Emerging Asia
Ho-Fung Hung, “Is the Rise of China Sustainable?” from China and the Transformation of Global Capitalism
Further Reading
7. Southeast Asia and the Pacific: The Edges of Globalization The emergence of Southeast Asia from colonial control; the rise of Australia and New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands on the edges of globalization
Georges Coedès, “The Indianized States of Southeast Asia” from The Indianized States of Southeast Asia
Benedict Anderson, “Imagined Communities” from Imagined Communities
Sucheng Chan, “Vietnam, 1945–2000: The Global Dimensions of Decolonization, War, Revolution, and Refugee Outflows”
Celeste Lipow MacLeod, “Asian Connections” from Multiethnic Australia: Its History and Future
Joel Robbins, “Pacific Islands Religious Communities” from The Oxford Handbook of Global Religions
Further Reading
8. Europe and Russia: Nationalism and Transnationalism The role of Europe in creating the concept of the nation, transnational politics in the Soviet Union, and the rise of the European Union
Peter Stearns, “The 1850s as Turning Point: The Birth of Globalization?” from Globalization in World History
Eric Hobsbawm, “The Nation” from The Nation as Novelty
Seyla Benhabib, “Citizens, Residents, and Aliens in a Changing World” from The Postnational Self
Odd Arne Westad, “Soviet Ideology and Foreign Interventions in the Global Cold War” from The Global Cold War
Jürgen Habermas, “Citizenship and National Identity” from Praxis International
Further Reading
9. The Americas: Development Strategies The European conquest of the Americas, the rise of new societies, and varying patterns of economic development within a global context
Charles C. Mann, “Discovering the New World Columbus Created” from 1493: Discovering the New World Columbus Created
Tzvetan Todorov, “The Reasons for the Victory” from The Conquest of America
Francis Fukuyama, “Explaining the Development Gap between Latin America and the United States” from Falling Behind
Denis Lynn Daly Heyck, “Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Communities” from Surviving Globalization in Three Latin American Communities
Further Reading
PART III: TRANSNATIONAL GLOBAL ISSUES
10. Global Forces in the New World Order Paradigms for thinking about the new world order (or disorder) in the post– Cold War global era
Benjamin Barber, “Jihad vs. McWorld” from Jihad vs. McWorld
Samuel Huntington, “A Multipolar, Multicivilizational World” from The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, “Empire” from Empire
Saskia Sassen, “Global Cities” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Further Reading
11. The Erosion of the Nation-State The fading strength of the nation-state and the rise of alternative conceptions of world order
Kenichi Ohmae, “The Cartographic Illusion” from The End of the Nation-State
Susan Strange, “The Westfailure System” from Review of International Studies
Zygmunt Bauman, “After the Nation-State—What?” from Globalization: The Human Consequences
William I. Robinson, “The Transnational State” from A Theory of Global Capitalism
Further Reading
12. Religious Politics and the New World Order The religious challenge to the secular state in new conceptions of political order
Monica Duffy Toft, Daniel Philpott, and Timothy Samuel Shah, “The Twenty-first Century as God’s Century” from God’s Century: Resurgent Religion and Global Politics
Mark Juergensmeyer, “Religion in the New Global Order” from Europe: A Beautiful Idea?
Olivier Roy, “Al Qaeda and the New Terrorists” from Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah
Richard Falk, “Religion and Humane Global Governance” from Religion and Humane Global Governance
Further Reading
13. Transnational Economy and Global Labor Economic globalization: its relation to national economies, the growth of transnational corporations, and the changing role of labor
Richard Appelbaum, “Outsourcing” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Nelson Lichtenstein, “Wal-Mart: Template for 21st Century Capitalism?” from New Labor Forum
Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Us?” from Harvard Business Review
Jagdish Bhagwati, “Two Critiques of Globalization” from In Defense of Globalization
Joseph Stiglitz, “Toward a Globalization with a More Human Face” from Globalization and Its Discontents
Further Reading
14. Global Finance and Financial Inequality Changes in the concept of money and international financial markets
Benjamin J. Cohen, “Money in International Affairs” from The Geography of Money
Stephen J. Kobrin, “Electronic Cash and the End of National Markets” from Foreign Policy
Glenn Firebaugh, “The Rise in Income Disparities over the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries” from The New Geography of Global Income Inequality
Dani Rodrik, “Globalization for Whom?” from Harvard Magazine
Further Reading
15. Development and the Role of Women in the Global Economy Competing views of development and the role of women in the global economy
Alvin Y. So, “Social Change and Development” from Social Change and Development
Mayra Buvinić, “Women in Poverty: A New Global Underclass” from Foreign Policy
Kum-Kum Bhavnani, John Foran, Priya A. Kurian, and Debashish Munshi, “From the Edges of Development” from On the Edges of Development: Cultural Interventions
Further Reading
16. The Hidden Global Economy of Sex and Drugs Illegal trafficking in people and drugs, and the global attempts to control them
David Shirk, “The Drug War in Mexico” from The Drug War in Mexico: Confronting a Common Threat
Eduardo Porter, “Numbers Tell of Failure in Drug War” from the New York Times
Kevin Bales, “The New Slavery” from Disposable People: New Slavery in the Global Economy
Barbara Ehrenreich and Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Nannies, Maids, and Sex
Workers in the Global Economy” from Global Woman
Further Reading
17. Global Environmental and Health Crises The principal environmental and health problems that transcend national boundaries, and global attempts to alleviate them
Catherine Gautier, “Climate Change” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Ron Fujita, “Turning the Tide” from Heal the Ocean: Solutions for Saving Our Seas
Hakan Seckinelgin, “HIV/AIDS” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Further Reading
18. Global Communications and New Media The role of new media—video, internet, and social networking—in global culture and politics
Yudhishthir Raj Isar, “Global Culture and Media” from The Encyclopedia of Global Studies
Michael Curtin, “Media Capital in Chinese Film and Television” from Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV
Natana J. DeLong-Bas, “The New Social Media and the Arab Spring” from Oxford Islamic Studies Online
Pippa Norris, “The Worldwide Digital Divide” from Harvard University Kennedy School of Government
Further Reading
19. The Global Movement for Human Rights Transnational networks supporting human rights and legal protection for all
Micheline Ishay, “Globalization and Its Impact” from The History of Human Rights: From Ancient Times to the Globalization Era
Alison Brysk, “Transnational Threats and Opportunities” from Globalization and Human Rights
Eve Darian-Smith, “Human Rights as an Ethics of Progress” from Laws and Societies in Global Contexts: Contemporary Approaches
David Held, “Changing Forms of Global Order” from Cosmopolitanism
Further Reading
20. The Future of Global Civil Society The emerging sense of global citizenship, and nongovernmental organizations and movements comprising a new “global civil society”: is this the global future?
Mary Kaldor, “Social Movements, NGOs, and Networks” from Global Civil Society
Jan Nederveen Pieterse, “Shaping Globalization: Why Global Futures?” from Global Futures
Giles Gunn, “Being Other-Wise: Cosmopolitanism and Its Discontents” from Ideas to Die For: Cosmopolitanism in a Global Era
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation” from Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers
Further Reading
Acknowledgments Index
PREFACE A Friendly Introduction to Global Studies
I have a lot of friends on Facebook, and they live in all parts of the world. If I post something about global trade, I get responses from friends in China and Brazil. If I put up a link about interfaith harmony, I get appreciative “likes” from friends in Indonesia, India, and Northern Ireland. When I comment about domestic politics in the United States, I’m often politely ignored by my friends in the other part of the world, who find my local obsessions as arcane as I view their postings on Eritrean political squabbles. But when I post a link to a website that portrays nothing but pictures of bouncing cats, I receive appreciative notices from around the world. Everyone, it seems, loves bouncing cats. It is not just the bouncing cats that are global, however. It’s everything.
The very process of interaction and communication beyond national borders is a feature of our globalized world. And it is not just Facebook. Every time you go online, you go global. When you turn off the computer and go to the store, chances are you
will encounter not just your local milieu. A trip to Walmart is a journey into the global arena. And when you bring home all that stuff made not only in China but also in myriad countries around the world, you are literally bringing globalization home. Try this simple party game with your friends. Guess the country on everyone’s clothing labels, then check to see where the t-shirts and jackets and everything else you and your friends are wearing were made—Bangladesh, Trinidad, Cambodia, Yemen, or wherever. See how many countries are represented. And then imagine the journey that the clothing had to make, from cotton fields to textile factories to seaports and cargo containers to distribution centers to retail stores and eventually to the closets of you and your friends. Perhaps the most global area of your house is that closet. In some cases, you do not have to go anywhere to find examples of
globalization because they come to you. Globalization permeates the air that you breathe—including tiny particles emitted from volcanic eruptions half a world away. It affects your weather, as cycles of warming and cooling air react to global climate change. And globalization is part of the food that you eat. This is obvious if you have a taste for Chinese take-out or pad Thai noodles or Mexican burritos. But even if you are a meat-and- potatoes kind of person who likes a little tomato salad on the side, you are enjoying the effects of globalization about five hundred years ago. It was then that potatoes and tomatoes, plants originally found only in South America, were taken elsewhere by explorers to become a part of the food habits in North America, Europe, and around the world. Their dissemination was part of the extraordinary global diffusion of plants, germs, and cultures that followed European contacts with the Western Hemisphere, beginning with Columbus in 1492. So globalization is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. To study it is
to focus on the central feature of life in the twenty-first century. But how do you go about studying globalization? Is it really possible to study the whole world? Doesn’t this mean studying almost everything? And if so, where do you begin? These were the questions in the minds of a group of scholars who met in
Tokyo in 2008. They had met the year before in Santa Barbara, California, to explore the possibility of creating a new international organization for representatives of graduate programs in global studies—a whole new academic field that had been created in various universities around the world. The first college programs to be called “global studies” were formed in the mid-1990s, and within a decade there were hundreds. Students flocked to the new programs, intuitively knowing that this was something important. By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, graduate programs had been established in dozens of universities in Asia, Europe, and North America, including Japan, South Korea, China, India, Germany, Denmark, Russia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The field of global studies had arrived. But what was in this new field of study? When the scholars came
together in Tokyo in 2008, their main goals were to answer this question and to define the major features of the field of global studies. They came expecting to have something of a fight. After all, each of these programs had developed independently from the others. When representatives of all these different programs came together, they did not know what they would find, thinking that the field of global studies would be defined vastly differently in Tokyo, Leipzig, and Melbourne. But as it turned out, this was not the case. Happily, there was a great deal of agreement at the outset
regarding what the field of global studies contained and how to go about studying it. The five characteristics of global studies that the scholars agreed on at
that memorable founding meeting of the international Global Studies Consortium in Tokyo are discussed below.
Transnational. The scholars in Tokyo agreed that the field of global studies focuses primarily on the analysis of events, activities, ideas, trends, processes, and phenomena that appear across national boundaries and cultural regions. These include activities such as economic distribution systems, and ideologies such as nationalism or religious beliefs. The scholars used the term cultural regions as well as nations, since these kinds of global flows of activity and ideas transcend the limitations of regions even when they are not the same as national boundaries. Historically, much of the activity that we call “transnational” might more properly be called “transregional,” since it occurred before the concept of nation was applied to states.
Interdisciplinary. Since transnational phenomena are complex, these are examined from many disciplinary points of view. In general, the field of global studies does not keep strict disciplinary divisions among, for instance, sociological, historical, political, literary, or other academic fields. Rather, it takes a problem-focused approach, looking at situations such as global warming or the rise of new religio-political ideologies as specific cases. To make sense of these problem areas requires multiple perspectives, which may be economic, political, social, cultural, religious, ideological, or environmental. Scholars involved in global studies often work in interdisciplinary teams or freely use terms and concepts across fields of study. These scholars come from all fields of the social sciences (especially from sociology, economics, political science, and anthropology). And many of the fields are also related to the humanities, including particularly the fields of history, literature, religious studies, and the arts. Some scholars have expertise in areas of science, such as environmental studies and public health.
Contemporary and Historical. We think of globalization as being primarily contemporary, something unique to our time. But it is also historical. True, the pace and intensity of globalization have increased enormously in the post–Cold War period of the twentieth century and even more so in the
twenty-first century. But transnational activities have had historical antecedents. There are moments in history—such as in the ancient Mediterranean world during the Roman and Greek Empires—when there was a great deal of transnational activity and interchange on economic, cultural, and political levels. The global reach of European colonialism from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century provides another example of a global stratum of culture, education, technology, and economic activity upon which are based many aspects of the globalization of the twenty-first century. Thus, to fully understand the patterns of globalization today, it is necessary to probe their historical precedents.
Critical and Multicultural. The American and European view of globalization is not the only one. Although many aspects of contemporary globalization are based on European colonial precedents, most global studies scholars do not accept uncritically the notion that people in the West should be the only ones to benefit from economic, political, and cultural globalization. Some global studies scholars avoid using the term globalization to describe their subject of study, since the term sometimes is interpreted to imply the promotion of a Western-dominated hegemonic project aimed at spreading the acceptance of laissez-faire liberal economics throughout the world. Other scholars describe their approach as “critical globalization studies,” implying that their examination of globalization is not intended to promote or privilege Western economic models of globalization, but rather to understand it. To understand globalization well requires viewing it from many cultural
perspectives—from African and Asian, as well as European and American, points of view. Scholars of global studies acknowledge that globalization and other global issues, activities, and trends can be viewed differently in different parts of the world and from different socio-economic levels within each locality. For that reason, scholars of global studies sometimes speak of “many globalizations” or “multiple perspectives on global studies.” This position acknowledges that there is no dominant paradigm or perspective in global studies that is valued over others.
Globally Responsible. Scholars who work in global studies often advance an additional criterion for what they do: to help make the world a better place in which to live. By focusing on global problems, scholars imply that they want to help solve those problems. They also hope to foster a sense of global citizenship among their students. They like to think that they are helping to create “global literacy”—the ability to function in an increasingly
globalized world—by understanding both the specific aspects of diverse cultures and traditions and the commonly experienced global trends and patterns. Other teachers assert that they are providing training in “global leadership,” giving potential leaders of transnational organizations and movements the understanding and skills that will help them to solve problems and deal with issues on a global scale.
In this book we will embrace all of these aspects of global studies. In Part 2, we will move around the world from region to region—from Africa, the Middle East, South and Central Asia, East Asia, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific area to Europe and bicontinental Russia and the Americas. We explore readings that show how globalization is viewed from the perspective of each region, both historically and today. We will consider how global factors have affected each region and how each region has contributed to the larger currents of globalization during different historical periods. In Part 3, we will look at major transnational issues today, including the
decline of the nation-state, the rise of new religious politics, and several economic issues—such as finance, currency, and labor in the global economy; problems of development and the role of women in the world’s workforce; and the hidden economy involving trade in sex and illicit drugs. We will also explore global environmental problems, including climate change, transnational diseases and other global health issues, and global communications and new media, and end with a section on the role of civil society in the global future. In choosing the readings to explore these issues, I have tried to achieve a balance among disciplinary and cultural perspectives. And I hope for my readers to not only understand the nature of global problems, but also to consider some of the possibilities in solving them. So when you enter the field of global studies, you are encountering
some of the most significant aspects of our contemporary world. You are engaging with the transnational issues that have shaped the regions of the world from ancient times to the present and that are among the most pressing issues of our contemporary era. Like the Internet, global studies draws you into this wider world. But global studies, at its best, does more than that. As these readings will show, the scholars engaged in these studies have honed their analytic skills to make critical assessments and reasoned judgments about the character of the global transformations that are occurring around us. This does not make these scholars infallible; in fact, they frequently disagree with one another. But their insights do make them friends—not only to be liked, but also to be challenged by, to be
emulated, and to be known.
PART I
INTRODUCTION
1 THINKING GLOBALLY
Your friends may have peeked over your shoulders at this book and asked why you are interested in global studies. And they might have added, just what is that, anyway? So what do you tell them? You could say that you are studying what goes on in the world that knits us all together—but that sounds sort of soft and squishy. Or you could tell them that you are studying the economic and technological networks that interact on a global plane. But that’s only part of the story. The honest truth is that “global studies” can mean a lot of different
things, both the hard and the squishy. It is usually defined as the analysis of events, activities, ideas, processes, and flows that are transnational or that can affect all areas of the world. These global activities can be studied as one part of the established disciplines of sociology, economics, political science, history, religious studies, and the like. Or global studies can be a separate course or part of a whole new program or department. As an academic field, global studies is fairly new. It blossomed largely
after the turn of the twenty-first century. But the intellectual roots of the field lie in the pioneering work of the many different scholars who have thought globally over many decades. These thinkers have attempted to understand how things are related and have explored the connections among societies, polities, economies, and cultural systems throughout the world. One could argue that the first global studies scholars were among the
founders of the social sciences. Over a hundred years ago the pioneering German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) wrote a series of works on the religions of India, China, Judaism, and Protestant Christianity. Weber was interested in finding what was distinctive about each of them, and what was similar among all of them. Weber also attempted to discern
universal elements in the development of all societies. He showed, for example, that a certain kind of rational and legal authority and its associated bureaucratization was a globalizing process. Though his intellectual interests were Europocentric, his curiosity spanned the globe. Other early social scientists were also global thinkers. The French
sociologist Émile Durkheim (1858–1917) focused first on something very local: case studies of tribal societies. What he found, however, was something he regarded as quite global: the rise of organic solidarity based on functional interdependence. The German philosopher and social critic Karl Marx (1818–1883) likewise assumed that his theories were universal. Marx showed that capitalism was a globalizing force, one that would cause both production systems and markets to expand to encompass the entire world. Ideas in Europe, North America, and the rest of the Westernized world
were influenced by thinkers such as these. At the same time, significant thinking about intercultural commonalities and global awareness was being developed in intellectual centers in other parts of the world. The tolerant ideals of the Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldun were influential in North Africa and the Middle East, and notions of universal brotherhood advocated by the Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore had an impact on the intellectual circles of South Asia as well as on his admirers in Western societies. All of these early thinkers, both European and non-European, focused
on two ways of thinking globally: comparison and universality. In some cases, they looked at comparative and non-Western examples to determine differences and similarities. In other studies, they adopted intellectual positions that assumed a universal applicability. Hence early European theorists such as Weber and Marx thought that the social forces that were transforming Europe in the nineteenth century would eventually have relevance globally. Current scholarship in all areas of the humanities and social sciences—including global studies—is indebted to these pioneering scholars. But the specific focus on globalization itself is fairly new. Only recently
have scholars begun to examine transnational and global networks, flows, processes, ideologies, outlooks, and systems both historically and in the contemporary world. In fact, the first explicitly global works of scholarship of this sort only emerged a few decades ago, at the end of the twentieth century. One of the pioneers of contemporary global studies was the sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein, who helped to formulate world systems theory. He incorporated insights from political economy, sociology, and history in order
to understand global patterns of hegemonic state power. Other sociologists, including Roland Robertson, Saskia Sassen, and Manfred Steger, explicitly examined the concept of the global, as opposed to local, points of view. Perspectives from other disciplines have also contributed to global
studies. The anthropologist Arjun Appadurai broadened the understanding of global perspectives from landscape to a variety of “scapes”—culturally shaped understandings of the world. The political scientist David Held helped to formulate theories of politics in relation to globalization. William H. McNeill, Akira Iriye, and Bruce Mazlish, among other historians, helped to develop the subfields of world history and global history. Economists such as Joseph Stiglitz and Jagdish Bhagwati have analyzed economic interactions and changes in global terms. And in the field of religious studies, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Ninian Smart moved beyond the study of particular religious traditions to the study of world theology and worldview analysis, respectively. Other scholars developed analytic approaches to describe new forms of global society: Mary Kaldor examined an emerging global civil society while Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ulrich Beck have described what they regard as a cosmopolitan strand in the new global order. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, an imposing body of
scholarly literature and a flurry of new journals, book series, and scholarly conferences and associations emerged under the label of global studies. The field had arrived. This book provides a road map to the emerging field. At the same time—to mix metaphors—it provides a sampling of the intellectual feast that the current field provides. Global studies uses the term transnational a lot. What this means is that
global studies focus not just on the activities and patterns that are international—among nation-states—but also on those that exist beyond the borders of nations and regions and stretch across the various areas of the world. This is one way of thinking of global activity—not that it is universal, found everywhere on the planet, but that it transcends the usual boundaries that separate nation from nation. Transnational relations can be confined largely within a particular area of the world (such as economic cooperation within Europe, for instance, or among the nations along the Pacific Rim) and not necessarily occur throughout the whole world. At the same time, there are phenomena that are truly global in that they
are found everywhere, such as satellite communication systems that can be accessed anywhere on the planet. These are by definition transnational, since they occur beyond the limitations of national boundaries or control. All global phenomena encompass transnational linkages, but not everything
that is transnational is global. Terms can be confusing, but it’s useful to try to be as clear as possible about what we mean. In the field of global studies, we tend not to use the term international