The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith

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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 claim religious motivations, acts of terrorism are also political and cultural acts (Juergensmeyer 2000, 2001). Reinserting global processes into historical contexts allows us to reconnect the dots and make sense of what may otherwise appear to be discrete phenomena and random events. Global analyses look for patterns of both change and continuity, highlighting the deep historical continuities between the past and ongoing global processes (McCarty 2014b).

      It is important to note, moreover, that histories are always plural. Global histories should be decentralized and not privilege one historical narrative over another. One community’s understanding of the past must be situated against other peoples’ narratives and historical memories, which may be contradictory or even oppositional (Trouillot 1995). It is not sufficient to tell a singular or dominant Eurocentric understanding of history. Further, it is not sufficient for us in the Euro-American academy to tell the histories of others as if we knew better or had a more sophisticated understanding of what really took place. A global historical perspective recognizes that each society and people has its own unique understanding of the past, and that these various social understandings inform each other in dynamic interplay across time and geopolitical space.

      Sachsenmaier writes that new directions in global history suggest that history as a discipline “can contribute significantly to the study of globalization and to the struggles to establish global paradigms of thinking” (Sachsenmaier 2006: 465).¹ He goes on to remark:

      Now that scholars have begun to pursue global agendas while remaining sensitive to the full complexity of the local, the devil is in the detail. Or, seen from another perspective, the treasure trove is in the detail. In lieu of a detached macro-theoretical synthesis, the relationship between the global and the local will need to be explored through a myriad of detailed studies … Global and transcultural history can be at the very forefront of such an endeavor. (Sachsenmaier 2006: 461)

      For global scholars the historical/temporal dimension includes historical narratives as well as different conceptions of time itself. Not only do different cultures have different understandings of time (Ogle 2015), but global processes often occur on time horizons that are not recognized by fast-paced modern societies and the dominant global political framework (Hutchings 2008; Lundborg 2012). For example, some forms of environmental damage, such as leaching of toxins into water catchment areas, can be lethal to local residents. This kind of ecocide, however, is not classified as criminal violence in modern legal systems in part because the damage may occur over decades and generations (Nixon 2013). The slow pace of processes such as climate change, ocean pollution, and habitat destruction present unique regulatory challenges. The short time cycles associated with media, politics, and public attention make it difficult to develop multidecade strategies and implement long-term policies.

      Global Social Structures

      It is not an exaggeration to say that the concept of social structure was the cornerstone on which the modern social and behavioral disciplines were built. The founding fathers of social theory, including Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim, Max Weber, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Sigmund Freud, each contributed their own systemic or structural theories of society. This is one of the main reasons their contributions remain influential to this day.

      The ability to see beyond individual behavior to identify enduring patterns in society that constrain this behavior is perhaps the singular skill of a social scientist. This skill is analogous to what C. Wright Mills called the “sociological imagination” (Mills 1959). It is the ability to see that the individual’s free choices, called individual agency, are actually constrained or influenced by a myriad of preexisting conditions, norms, values, institutions, and structural relations. How an individual acts is hugely influenced by language, culture, nationality, legal system, age, gender, socioeconomic status, religion, family, education, geographic region, and so on. These social factors thoroughly shape individual “free” choices—choices such as whom to marry, what job to take, or what kind of transportation to use. The influence of social structures is such that the outcomes of individual “free” choices become overwhelmingly, statistically, and distressingly СКАЧАТЬ