ABSTRACT
Global studies emerged in the late 1990s as a transdisciplinary field of academic inquiry exploring the many dimensions of globalization. ‘What is there is also here and what is here is also there’ is probably the most succinct and uncontroversial summary of globalization’s central dynamics of interconnectivity, reconfiguration of space and time, and enhanced mobility. Although it has been extensively studied in sociology, economics, anthropology, geography, history, political science, and other fields, globalization falls outside the established disciplinary framework. It is only of secondary concern in these traditional fields organized around different master concepts: ‘society’ in sociology; ‘resources’ and ‘scarcity’ in economics; ‘culture’ in anthropology; ‘space’ in geography; ‘the past’ in history; ‘power’ and ‘governance’ in political science, and so on. By contrast, global studies has placed ‘globalization’—a contested keyword without a firm disciplinary home-at the core of its intellectual enterprise. The rise of global studies represents, therefore, a clear sign of the proper recognition of a new kind of social dynamic. But it also demonstrates that the nineteenth-century realities that gave birth to the conventional disciplinary architecture are no longer ours.1 Although global studies has open transdisciplinary ambitions, it is not hermetic. It welcomes various approaches and methods that contribute to a transnational analysis of the world as a single interactive system.
