ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the three key terms: knowledge production, area studies and global cooperation. It addresses the semantics of knowledge and its production; the comprehension of regions and areas in social science; and global cooperation with a focus on actors' connectedness across localities, nations, and regions. The chapter also discusses concrete aspects of international relations and cooperation. It further argues that the area where knowledge is generated and spread has a role to play for the view of actors' cooperation on a global scale. Knowledge arranged into disciplines as ordering principles and the empirical world arranged into areas has assumed a globally hegemonic status. This makes it difficult to expand the view beyond the scales, boundaries and container categories that have become dominant in research and theory-building. Discussed international relations and development cooperation as particular fields of study in which alternative views and concepts are hardly visible. Islamic views and concepts have been raised as cases in point.
