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