The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 1984 on structuration). So while global-scale issues may have macroscale dimensions, they also have localized manifestations. For global studies scholars, global-scale issues require a shift of focus not just from the national to the global, but from the national to the entire local-global continuum (Nederveen Pieterse 2013; Darian-Smith 2014). Further, global studies scholars argue that these kinds of global-scale issues can manifest simultaneously at multiple levels and that they often manifest differently at regional, national, and local levels. In this sense the local, national, regional, and global are better understood as embedded sets of relations: inseparable and continually creating and re-creating each other.

      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, СКАЧАТЬ