The openness to debating and constantly rethinking the field of global studies is also an ethical position. It underscores that Western scholars may not have all the answers to the world’s problems and that other people may have new things to say and innovative solutions to offer. As we will discuss more fully in the next chapter, the emerging field of global studies acknowledges the need for new ways of conceptualizing and analyzing global issues. This necessarily entails embracing new forms of knowledge within one’s own society as well as beyond from non-Western communities in an effort to think “outside the box.” Global studies, perhaps more so than any other arena of inquiry within the Euro-American academy, recognizes that what is happening “over there” in terms of poverty, inequality, exploitation, environmental degradation, and new types of warfare could also happen back home in what David Held calls a world of “overlapping communities of fate” (Held 2002: 57; Roy and Crane 2015). In foregrounding the message that “us” and “them” are intimately interconnected, global studies as a new field of inquiry is both dependent upon and deeply committed to learning from and respecting others. In other words, global studies views intercultural communication as an essential key to better understanding ourselves and our collective futures.
In the next chapter, we outline the significance and characteristics of global studies research. These features have several important theoretical, methodological, and analytical implications. By extracting an integrated global studies approach that builds on the transdisciplinary theoretical framework in Chapter 3, we propose a way of asking provocative questions that helps distill research into a unique set of methodological inquiries. In Chapter 4 we walk the reader through the steps of designing a global studies research project; in Chapter 5 we introduce mixed methods and global methodological strategies; and in Chapter 6 we discuss the specific advantages of a global case study, one that enables the researcher to analyze and engage with the complexity of global issues using a manageable research methodology. In Chapter 7 we illustrate our discussion with specific examples of global studies research that successfully deploys what we call a “global case study method.”
2Why Is Global Studies Important?
In recent years a number of scholars have sought to characterize the essential features of global studies scholarship and articulate why the field is so important for understanding our current era (Juergensmeyer 2011, 2014a, 2014b; Duve 2013; Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Gunn 2013; Sparke 2013; McCarty 2014b; Middell 2014; Steger 2015). Building on these conversations, in the first part of this chapter we list the main reasons why we feel global studies as a field of inquiry is important. Some of these reasons may seem obvious but others not so much, and hence we feel that the list below is a necessary exercise in establishing the value of the global studies enterprise. The points are intended to help scholars communicate why the field is important to students as well as to colleagues in other disciplines, university administrators, funding agencies, and so on.
In the second part of the chapter we list the main characteristics associated with a global studies approach that underscore the breadth and depth of what we identify and depict as global studies scholarship. Together these two lists are meant to help the reader quickly grasp the significance of global studies and its signature characteristics that collectively distinguish it as a new field of inquiry. In later chapters we explore how these characteristics feature in designing, implementing and analyzing global studies research projects (Chapters 4, 5, and 6).
WHY IS GLOBAL STUDIES IMPORTANT?
New Solutions to New Problems
A global studies approach offers new ways of thinking that have the potential to generate solutions to the kinds of global-scale problems that our rapidly globalizing world faces. Pressing issues such as climate change, economic development, regional violence, and resource depletion are among the new issues that call for innovative, perhaps previously unthinkable solutions. Global studies scholar Saskia Sassen, echoing many others in the field, argues that we are currently confronted with “limits in our current master categorizations,” and as a result fail to see beyond what we already recognize and assume to be important. She argues for the need to look for and “detect conceptually subterranean trends that cut across our geopolitical divisions” and open up new ways of seeing, confronting, analyzing, and interpreting the world (Sassen 2014: 8). For example, author and activist Naomi Klein in This Changes Everything connects disparate issues such as climate change, neoliberal market fundamentalism, democratization, and global health to argue for fundamental changes in capitalist societies (Klein 2014). Identifying global-scale issues, finding patterns in and connections between them, and proposing new ways to address these issues are some of the core functions of global studies as a field of inquiry.
New Solutions to Old Problems
In some cases a global studies approach can provide new ways of understanding problems that have been overlooked, ignored, or deliberately avoided. For example, global-historical analyses of the international regulatory system indicate that there may be inherent limitations in the modern international treaty system. The inherent limitations are in part the result of imbalances between powerful countries with economic, political, and military clout that can act unilaterally and smaller countries that cannot. These limitations hinder the development of strong multilateral institutions (e.g., International Criminal Court) and treaties (e.g., Kyoto Accord), effectively destabilizing the geopolitical order and increasing the tendency toward both regional conflict and violence by nonstate actors (e.g., ISIS). By shaking up the way we think about international issues, global approaches have the potential to bring new ways of thinking to old and enduring problems, such as immigration and human trafficking, that are notoriously difficult for nation-states to deal with.
One of the most common limitations in our general understanding of how the world is organized and functions is the nation-state’s taken-for-granted status as the container of political, economic, and cultural activities. But as Michel-Rolph Trouillot writes so compellingly in his book Global Transformations (2003), the nation-state only became accepted as the central political entity around the world in the nineteenth century, with the linguistic spread of languages such as French, English, and German (Anderson 1983; Bhabha 1990). Hence, Trouillot goes on to argue, it is only by appreciating the relatively short history of modern nation-state building that it becomes possible to reconceptualize solutions to old problems:
We are best equipped to assess the changes that typify our times if we approach these changes with a sober awareness that the national state was never as closed and as unavoidable a container—economically, politically, or culturally—as politicians and academics have claimed since the nineteenth century. Once we see the necessity of the national state as a lived fiction of modernity—indeed, as possibly a short parenthesis in human history—we may be less surprised by the changes we now face and may be able to respond to them with the intellectual imagination they deserve. (Trouillot 2003: 85)
Until scholars break out of the anachronistic international relations paradigm that takes nation-states as the core unit of analysis, they cannot begin to identify, integrate, and analyze global structures, systemic forces, and regulatory issues that operate both above and below the level of the nation-state. This is of course not to suggest that nation-states are no longer relevant in our current times, which is patently incorrect. In the early decades of the twenty-first century, many countries across the global south and global north have taken up aggressive reactionary positions and institutionalized laws and policies specifically intended to shore up a national