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