ABSTRACT

Global studies (GS) emerged in the late 1990s as a transdisciplinary field of academic enquiry exploring the many dimensions of globalization. The rise of GS represents a clear sign of the proper academic recognition of a new kind of social interdependence on a global scale. This chapter builds on Middell’s astute observation in the introduction to this handbook that TS offers urgent and necessary new perspectives, subjects, and methodological approaches to the social sciences and humanities. GS perspectives have greatly benefited from transregional insights. Indeed, the current transformation of territorial organizations and infrastructures has reoriented much globalization research from an overly narrow attachment to the global scale toward the investigation of subglobal dynamics and practices that shape the emerging network society of the twenty-first century. The arguments of deterritorialization extremists became prominent during the 1990s when worldwide neo-liberal market reforms seemed to diminish the role of the state in the economy.