The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies

S. A. Hamed Hosseini, James Goodman, Sara C. Motta, Barry K. Gills

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780429893384
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Customer Relations
• Index: Business

The Routledge Handbook of Transformative Global Studies provides diverse and cutting-edge perspectives on this fast-changing field. For 30 years the world has been caught in a long 'global interregnum, ' plunging from one crisis to the next and witnessing the emergence of new, vibrant, multiple, and sometimes contradictory forms of popular resistance and politics.

This global 'interregnum' – or a period of uncertainty where the old hegemony is fading and the new ones have not yet been fully realized – necessitates critical self-reflection, brave intellectual speculation and (un)learning of perceived wisdoms, and greater transdisciplinary collaboration across theories, localities, and subjects. This Handbook takes up this challenge by developing fresh perspectives on globalization, development, neoliberalism, capitalism, and their progressive alternatives, addressing issues of democracy, power, inequality, insecurity, precarity, wellbeing, education, displacement, social movements, violence and war, and climate change. Throughout, it emphasizes the dynamics for system change, including bringing post-capitalist, feminist, (de)colonial, and other critical perspectives to support transformative global praxis.

This volume brings together a mixture of fresh and established scholars from across disciplines and from a range of both Northern and Southern contexts. Researchers and students from around the world and across the fields of politics, sociology, international development, international relations, geography, economics, area studies, and philosophy will find this an invaluable and fresh guide to global studies in the 21st century.

Part I

Theory in transition

1

Reinventing global studies through transformative scholarship

A critical proposition

S. A. Hamed Hosseini and Barry K. Gills

Introduction: the radical implications of impending global catastrophe

Evidence is mounting of an approaching global civilizational crisis, induced by the ‘modernity paradigm’ and driven by universalized laws of capital, that leads to crossing a set of crucial planetary environmental thresholds and tipping points and thereby jeopardizing the future of human civilization (Hansen et al., 2017; Lewis & Maslin, 2018; Steffen et al., 2018). Declining biodiversity and accelerating species extinctions; fatal global pandemics; deforestation and forest degradation; ocean acidification and pollution; melting polar ice sheets and sea level rise; thawing permafrost and methane releases; desertification; global heating and climate change; rapidly expanding natural resource extraction and global materials consumption, etc.; the list could be extended. We live in unprecedented circumstances, which call for unprecedented action. Nothing less than profoundly radical transformations will be capable of arresting and reversing these trends towards global destruction. Scientists are increasingly warning us that the inter-actions and feedback processes among the many tipping points are insufficiently understood. We face the possibility of a state shift to a ‘Hothouse Earth’ pathway of irreversible runaway global warming, inducing societal collapse and eventually rendering human civilization as we know it untenable. The urgent task is to establish a new pathway to a ‘Stabilized Earth’ through a radical shift to a paradigm of ‘Earth System Stewardship’ in the era of the Anthropocene (Steffen et al., 2018). It is no longer alarmist to state the facts. The reality is that ‘this changes everything’ (Klein, 2014). Understanding the full implications of this reality and taking the actions needed to seriously address these acute multiple crises is the central historical imperative of our times.

We cannot ignore the persistently high aggregate levels of global poverty and mounting evidence of rising inequality in wealth (Piketty & Goldhammer, 2014). For some, the much vaunted and yet chimerical ‘global governance’ in the post-Global Financial Crisis era should be (re)constructed to move humanity towards a more equitable, just, and sustainable world order, as McKeon (2017) argues. While the most powerful corporate and military elites and nation states in the current world (dis)order are still able to prominently shape the world’s direction in response to climate change (Buxton & Hayes, 2015), new political forces are simultaneously arising within and across many nations, drawing on ‘anti’ and ‘alter’ globalization perspectives and the lived experiences of (mal)development practices. There is growing interest in and momentum towards reconstituting the solidarity of global forces of resistance (Cox & Nilsen, 2014; Gills & Chase-Dunn, 2019). The voices and praxes of the social forces emanating from the Global South are pivotal to this conjuncture in the history of radical movements for social transformation. This is the view of a growing number of critical scholars and activists around the world. This awakening is conjoined with calls for decoloniality and pluriversality, for recognition and deployment of multiple epistemologies and ontologies (Gudynas, 2016; Mignolo & Walsh, 2018; Santos, 2007).

In the name of the ‘urgency of (doing) now and here’, the urgency of being ready for what appears to be a chaotic future, one potentially full of revolutionary moments and movements, continues to remain lacking in the Left’s imagination and in critical scholarship-activism. This is not to undervalue the rising utopian experimentalism of today’s post-capitalist interstitial alternatives that attempt to embody visions of the future in contemporary, concrete, realistic practices within the self-reliant, self-entrenching niches of capitalism (Wright, 2018). Rather, it is to make an urgent call for revitalizing the tradition of transcending capital. As we argue later, to help resurrect much-needed historical agency, a ‘critical utopianism’ is needed to overcome the false dichotomy between the old transcending utopia and the new interstitial utopian impulse. The utopian dimension of ‘the ruthless critique of everything existing’ (Foster, 2018) needs to be complemented with the critical dimension of utopian collective imagination.

To presently exercise the future change that we want to bring about (‘be the change you wish to see’) is not enough. We also need to surpass to the future change we are presently struggling to be by challenging the way the ruling systems have shaped the foundations of our imagination and inquiry. To do so, critical global studies (CGS) need to be actively developing and systematically engaging in communities of communal enquiry, where facts/realities and values/ideals are constantly (re)assessed in their contexts, and the emancipatory legacies of the past are put into new dialogue with the radical utopian imaginaries of the future. Efforts for the liberation of our critical transformative imagination – through self-reflection and intellectual-political engagement – will keep pushing our debates beyond the contours of Eurocentric, (post-)modernist, or liberal humanist perspectives (Darian-Smith, 2015). And yet, radical transformative counter-hegemonic discourses and praxis remain in a formative phase and have not yet fully kept historical pace with the acceleration of the forces of global(ized) capital(ism) driving towards catastrophe.

Critical scholarship during this ‘interregnum’ faces numerous challenges on the path to producing new knowledge of Self, Other, and the pluriversal histories of civilizations. The old ‘normal’ is not yet dead and the new ‘normal’ not yet born. Seductively intertwined development-globalization discourses have been the pivot around which a Western dominated global capitalist structure has revolved. During the present historic era of the decomposition of this hegemonic project, neo-structuralist and post-structuralist critiques are also in jeopardy, facing the challenge of now what? To depart from this historical impasse, we need to radically revise our conceptual lexicons and restructure our political agendas. At the heart of this new struggle lies ‘the critical’ as a feature that defined several decades of diverse intellectual currents and movements of resistance with respect to modern(ist) globalization (Andrews, 2013). The question now is: What does it mean to be ‘critical’ in an era of mounting acute contradictions and crises, where de-globalizing social forces are going ‘global’, destructive maldevelopment is outpacing constructive development, and where criticism runs out of steam as its objects of critique fast approach a historical dead-end? What new directions should, or could, a new radical transformative scholarship take?

The first step is to question ‘the critical’ tradition anew, and the critique of extant forms of power/hegemony and disobedience, rebellion and resistance. The critical now needs to be made conscientiously transformative. Much greater analytical and political attention should be shifted to the radical imagination of utopian practices and visions that bear the potential to radically refashion human and nonhuman life. Upon that basis we can make increased efforts to explore innovative ways through which the historical, natural, and civilizational capacities for liberation can be realized through radical transformative praxis.

Quite often, power is associated with reality, and the moral truth with ideality. But it is inadequate to concentrate on investigating the contradictions in the domain of dominance and exploitation without simultaneously analyzing opportunities for new kinds of resistance and transformative movements to emerge. A critical analysis should not fall short of acknowledging the existential basis on which the struggles for the realization of moral truth are grounded or treat them as entities that belong to the domain of imaginative or visionary ideals which are deemed merely dependent on the failures, flaws, and crises of the dominant systems-discourses. Rather, it is on the terrain of such collective struggles that real social alternatives are constructed. Where such struggles fall short of their own principles and visions, or devolve into struggles over supremacy, it is our responsibility as scholars to show how this happens and how it can be prevented or reversed.

Without indulging in romanticizing the past and emerging/future alternatives, a radical transformative scholarship should aim to discover the historical, ecological, and civilizational capacities and experiences of human emancipation. A global history of resistance is yet to be written. It is also necessary to facilitate cross-fertilization across context-specific alternatives. Thus, the greatest challenge is to overcome the fragmented and often chaotic nature of pluralism, without succumbing to totalizing narratives of moral truth. This requires endeavors to furnish a common language where dialogical communication and collaboration between different historical projects can fruitfully happen. Such a new agenda in CGS requires a shift in the epistemological underpinning of our theories, i.e. to embrace a ‘critical utopianism’, and a shift in our ontology from the dualism of humanity vs. nature and of the truth vs. the real, towards a new dialectic of the truth and the real.

We argue that the severity of the present global socio-ecological crises, now accelerating and moving towards possible global catastrophe, demands an urgent focus on radical transformations, profoundly affecting global change in theory and practice. Below, we will discuss features of such a radical transformative paradigm. We start this process by critically reflecting on a globalist tendency within our community of critical thinkers (see the next section). By critically revisiting what identifies CGS as ‘critical’, we will discuss how a ‘ruthlessly critical’ appraisal of what it means to be the critical in the current context of civilizational crises helps us reinvent CGS into transformative global studies (TGS). This is particularly acute in the current context of what some call the ‘post-globalization’ era (Latham, 2016), characterized by the weakening of previous patterns of global and regional integration, on-going economic weakening following the global financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath (Roberts, 2016), and the widespread resurgence of nationalist/populist politics and ideologies and authoritarianism.

Global studies in the post-globalization era

Global Studies Encyclopedic Dictionary (Chumakov, Mazour, & Gay, 2014, p. 223) defines Global Studies as a multi-disciplinary but integrative field of investigation aimed at analyzing globalization, global problems, and global processes. This definition signifies a routinely accepted perception among scholars in this field that global studies is ultimately about globalization and its impacts on human beings and the biosphere. A special issue of Globalizations in 2013 hosted a debate on global studies between a number of leading scholars in this field. Jan Nederveen Pieterse (2013), in his extensive review of global studies, criticized the field for not being adequately and systematically interdisciplinary, multi-centric, and recognizant of the multidimensionality of global change. He nevertheless recognizes a rather linear progress in the evaluation of the field, which itself indicates an emerging capacity for what he envisions as an analytically different approach to the existing trends.

From their early stages, social scientific studies of globalization have been aware of the multiplicity of global transformations and of the serious structural contradictions promoted by globalization (Amoore et al., 2000; Steger, 2013). This trend is, however, not satisfactorily mature and thus still requires us to become more reflective of the implications of the growing contradictions for the metatheoretical assumptions that underpin our theories in global studies. What remains puzzling is the situation whereby the more CGS has acknowledged the existing complexities, the more is added to our confusion(s); mostly as the result of addressing so many contradictory processes under a totalizing framing. CGS can no longer be exclusively about globalization, since the notion itself, whether in the sense of time–space compression in all major aspects of life across the globe, or as an expansionist economic (neo)liberalization trend, has exhausted its capacity to play the role of the ‘theory of everything’. In fact, it has already started to lose its conceptual centrality, reflecting the way recent major social transitions are now transpiring (for more debates on this, see Hosseini & Gills, 2018).

Many studies show that processes through which social relations have crossed their traditionally established boundaries have actually been asymmetrical, partial, and directed by sources of power (Held & Kaya, 2007; Scholte, 2000). These processes have resulted in responses such as the World Social Forum, that attempt to connect transformative social forces from across the world, but also in fragmentations, e.g. in regional entities such as the European Union (recently manifested by the Brexit referendum result in the UK) or mobilization of right-wing movements and national-populism, as well as a broad range of various reformist, hybridizing, and radically transformative alternative movements across the globe. The acknowledgment of the partiality of globalization processes is a step forward (Scholte, 2008). However, such a moderation by changing the ‘G word’ to a ‘g word’ still fails to recognize that there are similarly important processes that need to be analyzed in their interactive relation to one another, rather than separately, as is the case today in much of existing global studies. This includes processes such as: localization, internationalization, polarization, Americanization, McDonaldization, creolization, hybridization, and Balkanization (O’Byrne & Hensby, 2011). These are multiple processes in interaction with one another, rather than simply being the multiform of one mega-phenomenon called globalization.

The more such processes infiltrate into our analysis, the more the analytical autonomy of ‘globalization’ weakens. Pieterse’s (2013) proposed reformation, by maintaining commitment to the centrality of globalization in his ideal value-added global studies, however, leaves the current paradigm mainly unchallenged. A profound shift is needed towards giving primacy to studies of existing, emerging, and potential alternatives to the dominant paradigms of globalization as led by global capital. This requires a radical change in our conception of reality. The reality of most contemporary global developments is an ever-increasing accumulation of failure, destruction, and discontent. Thus, to consider ‘what is to be done’ as a secondary or utopian task is now ‘unrealist(ic)’. If the aim of a radical transformative scholarship i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Towards new agendas for transformative global studies: an introduction
• PART I: Theory in transition
• PART II: Transformation in the interregnum
• PART III: Alternative futures: beyond the interregnum
• Index