The cross-pollination of ideas between these various interdisciplinary programs cultivated a wide range of ideas about subjectivity, identity, governmentality, postcoloniality, and so on. As we discuss in Chapter 3, the concept of transdisciplinarity, coined by Jean Piaget in 1970, encapsulates these dynamic theoretical exchanges within and between the global north and the global south in the second half of the twentieth century (Piaget 1972). These exchanges informed a new set of thematics that transcended disciplinary thinking and that have reshaped conventional disciplines within the academy over the past three decades. Transdisciplinarity provides the theoretical platform upon which global studies as a new field of inclusive inquiry is currently building.
DEBATING GLOBALIZATION
The flourishing of new ways to analyze complex social relations between nations and peoples in the postwar period was followed by the emergence of globalization as a focus of study. While there have been many periods of globalization over the centuries, twentieth-century globalization blossomed under geopolitical and technological conditions unique to the current era (Nederveen Pieterse 2012). Global processes in the 1970s took the interconnectedness between nation-states, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and a host of other nonstate and civil society actors to new levels. Globalization first became topical within the international finance and trade sectors, in new articulations of global capitalism. As markets opened up, new economic theories and policies substantiated what has come to be called the age of neoliberalism. Encapsulating neoliberalism as an economic logic, Milton Friedman, Nobel Prize winner in economics, declared in 1970 that “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits” (Friedman 1970).
The United States and United Kingdom led the charge in implementing neoliberal economic policies that favored business interests, maximized private corporate power and profits, and devalued the role of the state in regulating exploitative financial practices that jeopardized labor safeguards and public interests. China began its own push toward market liberalization (Duménil and Lévy 2004; Harvey 2007). New digital technologies heightened the speed and capacities of economic exchange around the world and facilitated a sense—at least in the global north—of a new era of free-market globalization. The financial cycles of the 1980s and 1990s and the formation of international business elites underscored the rise of a new “global imaginary” (Steger 2008). During this period, the United States emerged as the global economic superpower, taking advantage of emerging economies in countries such as Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (collectively referred to as BRICS). Today, of course, the political and economic landscape is very different. The size of China’s economy has grown rapidly and the United States is no longer the undisputed world leader. Neoliberalism has come under attack, and it is largely blamed for undermining democratic processes in its promotion of unsustainable greed. The 2008 global economic crisis can be seen as the culmination of a long, slow process of global privatization and deregulation that brought the financial world to its knees, dismantled the middle classes, and created unprecedented levels of global inequality and insecurity (Beck 1992, 2009; Chomsky 1999).
It is important to note that globalization was not entirely driven by transnational economic exchange and international financial practices, as economists, with their determinist theories, are inclined to claim (see Appadurai 1996). In the 1980s and 1990s the world also experienced huge shifts in ideological affiliations with the fall of the Berlin Wall and communism, the rise of postcolonial aspirations through self-determination, and the evolution of new cultural and social networks that were both transnational and subnational in nature. Put differently, in the latter half of the twentieth century new forms of community and subjectivity that transcended standard nationalist ideologies and allegiances emerged. The rise of a global environmental movement and Green Party politics, the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa through global political pressure, the call for a global response to the AIDS epidemic—all of these events highlighted people’s global interdependence and affirmed that a global worldview was essential for dealing with issues that could not be managed or contained by any one country. These events, and other global challenges, disrupted the centrality, stability, and ideology of the sovereign nation-state, ushering in what some commentators have labeled our current postnational or “post-Westphalian” age (Falk 2002).
As neoliberal economics picked up traction and dismantled welfarism and regulatory state bureaucracies throughout the 1990s and 2000s, so too did notions of democracy come under attack within both Western and non-Western societies. Ideological and political shifts across the world diminished people’s sense of an active public sphere and a strong secular state system that could defend the rights of workers, women, and ordinary people against greedy capitalists and deregulated financial markets. These shifts helped to bolster the rise of religious fundamentalism and extremism around the world among Christians, Hindus, Muslims, and other religious communities. Religious extremism has offered new forms of authority that have attracted millions of people in lieu of the nation-state paradigm, which has proven unable to protect the rights of citizens and in the process diminished many people’s sense of national loyalty (Juergensmeyer 2000; Juergensmeyer, Griego, and Soboslai 2015; Yang 2008). 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