The Global Turn. Eve Darian-Smith
independence. Yet despite conservative political rhetoric, harsh immigration laws, and popular, jingoistic nationalism, the role of the nation-state as the central political entity governing the world is profoundly destabilized in our contemporary, post-Westphalian world (Falk 2002; Brown 2014).
Powerful Analytical Tools
A global studies approach offers unique insights and new, powerful analytical capacities. By situating the local-global continuum in deep historical contexts, global studies has the potential to reveal temporal, spatial, and conceptual connections we could not otherwise have seen or even imagined. For instance, it allows us to begin to trace the connections between empires, colonialism, modern imperialism, and new forms of imperialism in the world today. Global studies suggests that important connections exist between events and processes, even when events appear to be disconnected and separated by time, space, or even our own categories of thought.
A global synthesis supports the development of new analytical concepts. Take, for example, the labor, human rights, environmental, and women’s movements. These movements are often studied within the context of a single nation. Even when studied as international social movements, they are typically treated as discrete phenomena. In contrast, a global studies approach would analyze these movements as globally interrelated (Martin 2008). Taking it a step further, a global perspective could link them all together as parts of a larger, antisystemic movement that addresses various facets of inequality and injustice in the global political economy. This understanding could in turn support the formation of entirely new levels of global intersectional solidarity with the potential for large-scale, worldwide change.
Practical and Policy Applications
A global studies approach is important because it offers unique insights into real world problems. For example, in Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection, anthropologist Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing analyzes the processes of cross-cultural communication and miscommunication that contribute to deforestation in the rainforests of Indonesia (Tsing 2005). The actors involved in her study include the indigenous people of the region, relocated peasant farmers, environmental activists, legal and illegal loggers, local politicians, government agencies, international scientists, resource speculators and investors, multinational corporations, and UN funding agencies. The “friction” Tsing describes is the result of their collective interactions, their miscommunications, and all that gets lost in translation. In areas where the government of Indonesia lifted logging bans, intending to allow limited legal access, it also enabled the increasing penetration of illegal logging and property rights violations that it could not monitor. The result was dysfunction at the local and national levels that left the rainforests and indigenous people of Indonesia vulnerable to massive overexploitation by global markets.
The policy implications of this kind of functional/dysfunctional analysis are many. For example, one could use this approach to argue that governments that lack resources should avoid making their natural resources available to unfettered exploitation. Where local governments lack the resources to monitor, enforce, restrict, and benefit from the extraction processes that are detrimental to the environment and local populations, they should rely on types of regulation that are easier to enforce, such as banning all drilling, mining, fishing, and hunting in clearly delineated zones until those activities can be properly monitored and controlled.
Studies such as Tsing’s indicate that the insights that result from a global studies approach may be most valuable when deployed at the places where the different political, economic, cultural, and legal elements of global systems interact. By focusing on processes of exchange, and the interactive processes of communication, translation, and interpretation from region to region and from the global to the local, global perspectives can look beyond the nation-state to highlight and interrogate the various functions and dysfunctions within global systems, structures, and institutions. To the degree that geopolitical and economic forces play a part in creating global issues such as mass migration, conflict, climate change, and resource depletion, analyzing larger systems is essential for understanding and acting on these problems.
Global Civics and Citizenship
The field of global studies has the power to transform how both students and more advanced scholars understand current global issues. Every day we are all confronted with headlines that present the world as a dizzying array of apparently disconnected and chaotic events. A global studies approach encourages scholars to identify persistent patterns across time and space. For example, researchers may grapple with the challenge of sustainable economic development. A global studies analysis of economic development may include regional histories of colonization, multinational development policies, national politics, and demographic and environmental changes as well as local institutions, customs, and agricultural practices. In thinking about these multiple elements and perspectives across time and space, scholars are likely to encounter the power and limitations of the modern development paradigm. In a similar way, they can engage with the multiple historical, economic, geopolitical, and cultural factors that shape global issues such as immigration, poverty, regional violence, and ethnic conflict within the context of larger global governance issues such as human rights and global commons. In this way a global studies approach offers scholars a unique, coherent, and more holistic way of understanding ongoing global affairs.
Global perspectives empower scholars and students to understand the world in new ways, as well as to act as citizens of the world (Gaudelli 2016). Teaching the next generation of scholars to reach beyond nationalism to embrace the wider humanity, and encouraging them to think seriously about the possibilities of global citizenship, can transform their fundamental understanding of the individual’s role in society and our collective place in the world.
Critical Thinking
In general terms, critical thinking means a willingness to think openly, challenge one’s own assumptions and concepts, reflect upon the structures of knowledge that guide human actions, and question the implicit bias involved in specific forms of communication. As Michael Scriven and Richard Paul have argued,
Critical thinking is the intellectually disciplined process of actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying, analyzing, synthesizing, and/or evaluating information gathered from, or generated by, observation, experience, reflection, reasoning, or communication, as a guide to belief and action. In its exemplary form, it is based on universal intellectual values that transcend subject matter divisions: clarity, accuracy, precision, consistency, relevance, sound evidence, good reasons, depth, breadth, and fairness. (Scriven and Paul 1987)
Being a critical thinker is not about being negative or trying to dismantle everything, as some unsophisticated scholars are apt to claim. Rather, being a critical thinker is about refusing to be complacent in the surety of one’s understanding of a problem or concept, and asking new questions in order to both test one’s ideas and seek new ways of knowing and explaining. Critical thinking is taught in many national curricula at the high school level and is viewed as essential to fostering engaged intellectual exchange and reflective contextualization. At the university level, critical thinking lies at the core of pioneering and progressive scholarship, be it in the social sciences, humanities, or physical sciences.
The term critical thinking has its roots in the second half of the nineteenth century and is typically associated with neo-Marxist thought and its criticism of the rational actor model fundamental to modern liberal economics. In the twentieth century, critical thinking is associated with the Annales School and Frankfurt School of the interwar period. Members of the Annales School included Lucien Febvre, Marc Bloch, and Fernand Braudel. Together, these scholars introduced a new historiography that took a more holistic approach in its serious engagement with cultural and social historical analyses of all classes of society, including peasants, farmers, and the poor. The Frankfurt School’s members included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Other important critical thinkers include Antonio Gramsci, György Lukács, and Jürgen Habermas, to name a few of the more well known. Many of the members moved to Columbia University in New York to escape the persecution of Nazi Germany. These intellectuals were disillusioned with the ideologies of capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism and sought to understand the structures and mechanisms of class conflict and social inequality. In theoretical terms,