ABSTRACT
As is well known, ‘globalization’ developed during and after the late 1980s into a central term for the explanation of recent social change. International studies have a long institutional history within the realm of political science and international relations (IR), with first chairs already established following the First World War. It became a distinct field in its own right as a reaction to post-Cold War politics in the 1990s. Even though in the first years of globalization research the trend toward homogeneity was probably overestimated, the focus shifted to the enormous plurality of reactions to global flows, assuming that such a plurality was politically possible. Transregional studies not only has a growing importance when it comes to the transcendence and transformation of regions that had been separately studied in area studies, but it also helps global studies to overcome an essentialization of what is referred to as global, though it is more often limited in its spatial reach.
