International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   Over the last few decades the world has become much more integrated. The volume of trade, foreign direct investment, and capital movements has rapidly expanded. New communications technologies and cheaper travel have made us not only more aware of distant cultures and places but have made it possible for us to experience events differently than in the past. This became especially clear as the September 11, 2001, attacks unfolded on TV screens across the world in real time. In other words, peoples and societies that may have been unaware of each other's existence only a few years ago now encounter one another in multiple venues and in multiple forms. The term global has been used both in and outside of academic circles for centuries. The term globalization , however, is newer and began to gain currency only in the 1980s. Today, globality is often understood as the end state of the world coming together or “a condition characterized by the existence of a single sociopolitical space on a planetary scale [that has] resulted from the gradual dissolution of boundaries brought about by intensified exchange and increased interconnectedness between territorially bounded and distinct societies” (Bartelson 2009). These changes in turn have profound consequences for the how the political is understood. For Scholte (1999) globality therefore implies a fundamental ... log in or subscribe to read full text