You say de-globalization, I say post-globalization; but don’t call the whole thing off (with apologies to Ira Gershwin)

Abstract

Victor Roudometof's thought-provoking article revisits questions the academy has asked of itself ever since globalization became a must-have concept in the late 1980s: What are we talking about? Have we got it and to what degree? Where is it headed? And finally, what does all this mean for the social-scientific prospectus? Answers to the first two questions are superficially easy but how we respond to them still has a profound bearing on the demeanour of social-scientific inquiry into the human condition. So, willy-nilly, our attention is drawn to the status of global studies as a callow branch of knowledge. If globalization is the matrix of processes that extend social relations and consciousness across world space and world time, what is de-globalization? More to the point, what is post-globalization, the elusive subject of Roudometof's essay? Much abroad these days the latter still gets rather short-shrift as a usable concept despite the fact that it is being asked to carry a considerable analytical burden when describing and predicting the demeanour of the world. De-globalization does not signify an inevitable end to globalization, only a change in its density, extensiveness and velocity. On the other hand post-globalization has about it an aura of transformation. It implies radical, not to say systemic, change. Today we are witnessing renewed attention to globalization because of the changing nature of 21st century global dynamics; though whether these actually sum to a ‘new’ globalization is rightly contested. Is a more agonistic multipolarity the defining feature of this changing (dis)order?