ABSTRACT
The sources, processes, and dynamics of globalization are woefully understudied by political scientists. In particular, its political and cultural aspects are not probed nearly as much as seems desirable. As new electronic technologies and greater flows of goods, funds, people, information and ideas shrink the world and as these developments generate various responses around the world, the need for probing investigations into the integrative and disintegrative underpinnings of global life intensifies accordingly. The U.S.’s tendencies to engage in unilateral actions abroad need to give way to policies designed to facilitate local institutions in other countries. To live in a globalizing world is to recognize that new centers of authority are being formed in every community and region elsewhere, giving rise thereby to a worldwide pattern in which decentralizing processes have become the central tendency at work in the world. Localization is no less salient as a global dynamic than globalization, and it may even be more powerful.
