Global Studies

Global studies is the analysis of events, activities, ideas, processes, and flows that are transnational or that could affect all areas of the world. Although scholars have analyzed global phenomena for many decades, as an academic field, global studies blossomed largely after the turn of the 21st century, and it has expanded seemingly exponentially since the first programs were founded in Asian, European, and American universities in the 1990s.

Although some scholars argue that there are scholarly approaches to global phenomena that are distinctly appropriate to transnational subject matter, most scholars rely on established analytic approaches in the social sciences and humanities; and in that sense, the field of global studies is interdisciplinary. The intellectual roots of the field lie in the pioneering work of disparate scholars who have attempted to understand the interconnected relationships among societies, polities, economies, and cultural systems.

Although the field of global studies is new, some of its intellectual concerns reach back to the founding period of the social sciences. The pioneering sociologist, Max Weber (1864–1920), wrote a series of works on the religion of India, China, Judaism, and Protestant Christianity in an attempt to discern what was distinctive and similar among these cultural traditions. He also showed that rational-legal authority and its associated bureaucratization was a [Page 728]globalizing process. Similarly, Émile Durkheim (1858–1917), who based his understanding of social organization in large part on case studies from tribal societies, analyzed from a global perspective the rise of organic solidarity, based on functional interdependence. Karl Marx (1818–1883) likewise assumed that his theories were universal, and he showed that capitalism was a globalizing force, one in which both production systems and markets would eventually expand to encompass the entire world. Although the development of the liberal arts in the West was primarily influenced by European thinkers such as these, it should be pointed out that significant thinking about intercultural communalities and global awareness was being developed in intellectual centers in other parts of the world, where ideas such as those of Ibn Khaldun in North Africa and the Middle East and Rabindranath Tagore in South Asia were influential.

Hence some of the early intellectual interest in the global character of human society was evidenced in a variety of scholarly works that appreciated the importance of comparative studies, non-Western case studies, and intellectual positions that assumed a universality of applicability. The early European theorists saw that the social forces that were transforming Europe in the 19th century would eventually have relevance globally. Most of the works identified with the contemporary field of global studies build on these intellectual approaches in their attempts to assess transnational and global networks, flows, processes, ideologies, outlooks, and systems both historically and in the contemporary world.

In this regard, the first explicitly global works of scholarship emerged in the last decades of the 20th century. One of the pioneering efforts at global studies was the work of sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein, who helped to formulate world-systems theory; these ideas incorporated insights from political economy, sociology, and history in order to understand global patterns of the rise and fall of hegemonic state power. Other sociologists, including Roland Robertson and Manfred Steger, explicitly examined the concept of the global in contrast to local points of view. Anthropologist Arjun Appadurai broadened the understanding of global perspectives from landscape to a variety of “scapes,” culturally shaped understandings of the world. Political scientist David Held helped to formulate theories of politics in relation to globalization. William H. McNeill, among other historians, helped to develop the subfields of world history and global history. Several economists, including Joseph Stiglitz, were thinking of economic interaction and change in global terms. And in the field of religious studies, Wilfred Cantwell Smith and Ninian Smart moved beyond the study of particular religious traditions to the study of world theology and worldview analysis, respectively. Other scholars developed analytic approaches to describe new forms of global society; Mary Kaldor examined an emerging global civil society, and Kwame Anthony Appiah and Ulrich Beck described what they regarded as a cosmopolitan strand to the new global order.

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