ABSTRACT
The starting point for this book was the argument that the debates surrounding ‘globalization’ had so far yielded unsatisfactory explanations and conceptualizations of contemporary processes of socio-spatial restructuring. The reason, I suggested, can be found in globalization theorists’ acceptance of statist interpretations of modernity; taking those as their baseline, cautious and extreme globalists alike were bound to exaggerate the novelty of the present, to overestimate the degree of change and thereby ultimately to misunderstand the nature of the present conjuncture. Thus, rather than to reassert the continuing relevance of ‘classical’ frameworks of social and international relations theories, I argued that we face a challenge perhaps even greater than that identified by globalists: a new theory not for new times, but for the period now supposedly in decline or already past, precisely in order to better understand the transformations of the present.
