Global Flows and the International Community
- NINT 5001 - Global Flows and the International Community (Spring 2008)
This core course is meant to engage the core assumptions, systems, and logics that form the contours of the global and to provide a historically and theoretically informed basis for the further study and practice of international affairs. The terms “global” and “globalization” are relative linguistic newcomers for signifying interrelated processes that span cultures and scales. Though all movement of peoples from the earliest times can be construed as having a global effect in the most literal sense, and empires almost by definition have spanned distances and brought peoples into contact, the most common (though by no means only) referent of the term globalization are late 20th and early 21st century socio-economic processes. Our task in this class is not to exhaustively plumb the myriad interpretations of globalization in search of the true definition but to explore key processes from which our present era has emerged, replete with paradoxes and promises. In other words, this is not a class about “globalization” per se but about understanding how the global today emerges from the legacies of colonialism, the nation-state system, and capitalism. These legacies are our ineluctable inheritance, our daily reality, and the material we must work with and confront, especially for students or practitioners of international affairs.