From September 21 - 23, 2023, the Center for Global Studies participated in several days of conversation and discussion with fellow members of the Global Studies Consortium at Aarhus University in Denmark. The meetings were hosted by Professor Hagen Shultz-Forberg, a historian of Global and European History and founding director of the Aarhus University master’s program in International Studies. The consortium continued its over decade long tradition of organizing its annual meetings dually on furthering institutional collaboration and knowledge exchange toward the development of global studies programs and sharing research trends in the field from both faculty and graduate students. This year’s theme built upon Professor Schulz-Forberg’s current research project on global governance in a post-neoliberal world order.
Broadly, the sessions and lively discussion centered around how global studies as both a field of study and domain of research should respond to the changing global geopolitical landscape and concurrent climate warming crisis that demands our attention and critical analysis. These conversations centered around a changing sense of the overall units of analysis for global studies - potentially moving from analysis of the political, economic, and human society driven “global” factors towards conceptions of the “planetary,” which could more formally focus on interdisciplinary knowledge while decentering humans as both the primary actor in determining the fate of both human and ecological systems on the planet. Such a move would mark a progression of a field founded on the notion that we must both decenter research from the nation state as a natural unit of analysis and simultaneously engage in more interdisciplinary research in order to identify, critique, and resolve complex problems that occur on a global level.
Historian Dominic Sachsenmaier began the session with a provocative analysis of potential humanistic perspectives on planetary governance and planetary history as an emergent intellectual paradigm for understanding contemporary experience in a world in which humans are realizing the limits of their agency over a changing and less hospitable planet. Building on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, Sachsenmaier argues that we are living through a transformation of world order and need to develop new narratives that engage contemporary understanding beyond globalization while also engaging in historical research that maps out the range of globalization narratives over the past decades. He argues that humanities are essential to a contemporary understanding of these processes since they provide historical and epistemological depth coupled with multiple perspectives.
Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Professor of International Political Economy at the Free University of Amsterdam, highlighted shifts in the development of neoliberal driven economic policies and geopolitical configurations. Apeldoorn, who is also a Senator in the Dutch parliament, shared a fascinating network analysis driven study that maps and compares the influence wielded by think tanks and policy institutes through the affiliations of U.S. policy advisors from the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations. Appeldoorn’s work demonstrates the extent to which Trump’s network of advisors diverged from a constellation of organizations that have dominated policy circles in what is often described as the post-Cold War world order. Trump’s isolation from these networks and the continuation of Trump era policies by the Biden administration was debated as a potentially significant shift in U.S. policy making and a sign of ruptures within the geopolitical order marked by American hegemony and neo-liberal economic policies.
Discussions of the global political order continued with the work of the University of Copenhagen’s Anders Esmark, who shared research on the contemporary histories of technocracy and the changing role of expertise amidst the geopolitical changes we are experiencing within the contemporary social crises. Aarhus University post-doctoral fellow, Dr. Joshua Rahtz, provided further context to the historical role and development of technocracy from the interwar period, through the Cold War and into the present day. Discussion revolved around the rejection of expertise and technocrats in the contemporary populist movements and ways in which to better understand both the dangers and uses of technocracy as a means to address global problems.
These discussions animated and informed the consortium’s conversations regarding programmatic trends, research initiatives, and future collaboration within the group.
For more readings on these topics see:
Apeldoorn, Bastiaan van, Jaša Veselinovič, and Naná de Graaff. Trump and the Remaking of American Grand Strategy : the Shift from Open Door Globalism to Economic Nationalism. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023.
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Planetary Humanities: Straddling the Decolonial/Postcolonial Divide. Daedalus 2022; 151 (3): 222–233. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01940
Esmark, Anders. The New Technocracy. Bristol, UK ; Chicago, IL, USA: Bristol University Press, 2020. Print.
