The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 sense of autonomy and independence. Yet despite conservative political rhetoric, harsh immigration laws, and popular, jingoistic nationalism, the role of the nation-state as the central political entity governing the world is profoundly destabilized in our contemporary, post-Westphalian world (Falk 2002; Brown 2014).

      Powerful Analytical Tools

      A global studies approach offers unique insights and new, powerful analytical capacities. By situating the local-global continuum in deep historical contexts, global studies has the potential to reveal temporal, spatial, and conceptual connections we could not otherwise have seen or even imagined. For instance, it allows us to begin to trace the connections between empires, colonialism, modern imperialism, and new forms of imperialism in the world today. Global studies suggests that important connections exist between events and processes, even when events appear to be disconnected and separated by time, space, or even our own categories of thought.

      A global synthesis supports the development of new analytical concepts. Take, for example, the labor, human rights, environmental, and women’s movements. These movements are often studied within the context of a single nation. Even when studied as international social movements, they are typically treated as discrete phenomena. In contrast, a global studies approach would analyze these movements as globally interrelated (Martin 2008). Taking it a step further, a global perspective could link them all together as parts of a larger, antisystemic movement that addresses various facets of inequality and injustice in the global political economy. This understanding could in turn support the formation of entirely new levels of global intersectional solidarity with the potential for large-scale, worldwide change.

      Practical and Policy Applications

      A global studies approach is important because it offers unique insights into real world problems. For example, in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing analyzes the processes of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication that contribute to deforestation in the rainforests of Indonesia (Tsing 2005). The actors involved in her study include the indigenous people of the region, relocated peasant farmers, environmental activists, legal and illegal loggers, local politicians, government agencies, international scientists, resource speculators and investors, multinational corporations, and UN funding agencies. The “friction” Tsing describes is the result of their collective interactions, their miscommunications, and all that gets lost in translation. In areas where the government of Indonesia lifted logging bans, intending to allow limited legal access, it also enabled the increasing penetration of illegal logging and property rights violations that it could not monitor. The result was dysfunction at the local and national levels that left the rainforests and indigenous people of Indonesia vulnerable to massive overexploitation by global markets.

      The policy implications of this kind of functional/dysfunctional analysis are many. For example, one could use this approach to argue that governments that lack resources should avoid making their natural resources available to unfettered exploitation. Where local governments lack the resources to monitor, enforce, restrict, and benefit from the extraction processes that are detrimental to the environment and local populations, they should rely on types of regulation that are easier to enforce, such as banning all drilling, mining, fishing, and hunting in clearly delineated zones until those activities can be properly monitored and controlled.

      Studies such as Tsing’s indicate that the insights that result from a global studies approach may be most valuable when deployed at the places where the different political, economic, cultural, and legal elements of global systems interact. By focusing on processes of exchange, and the interactive processes of communication, translation, and interpretation from region to region and from the global to the local, global perspectives can look beyond the nation-state to highlight and interrogate the various functions and dysfunctions within global systems, structures, and institutions. To the degree that geopolitical and economic forces play a part in creating global issues such as mass migration, conflict, climate change, and resource depletion, analyzing larger systems is essential for understanding and acting on these problems.

      Global Civics and Citizenship

      The field of global studies has the power to transform how both students and more advanced scholars understand current global issues. Every day we are all confronted with headlines that present the world as a dizzying array of apparently disconnected and chaotic events. A global studies approach encourages scholars to identify persistent patterns across time and space. For example, researchers may grapple with the challenge of sustainable economic development. A global studies analysis of economic development may include regional histories of colonization, multinational development policies, national politics, and demographic and environmental changes as well as local institutions, customs, and agricultural practices. In thinking about these multiple elements and perspectives across time and space, scholars are likely to encounter the power and limitations of the modern development paradigm. In a similar way, they can engage with the multiple historical, economic, geopolitical, and cultural factors that shape global issues such as immigration, poverty, regional violence, and ethnic conflict within the context of larger global governance issues such as human rights and global СКАЧАТЬ