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Centre for Global Studies
Director: Professor Richard Langhorne
The importance of Global Studies
"Why should we make a special effort to understand globalisation? There are two important reasons: the process and the results of globalisation are changing the way we live our lives on a personal basis and they are changing the institutions which we collectively use to give form and predictability to our economic, social and political relationships. The second reason is that the word has become so widely used that it has taken on all sorts of levels of meaning which confuse rather than enlighten and constrain logical thinking about the exceedingly difficult problems that globalisation has brought. To give an example: views about globalisation have moved within a few years from seeing it is as an irresistible lava flow, to assessing it as only one among many features of the contemporary world, to dismissing it as 'globaloney', yet still being capable of fearing it as 'globaphobia'. Plainly some straightening out is required, or we shall begin to feel like Russell Mearns' nonsense poem:
As I was going up the stairWhat is globalisation and why has it happened?
I met a man who wasn't there.
He wasn't there again today;
I wish, I wish, he'd stay away.
Globalisation is the latest stage in a long accumulation of technological advance which has given human beings the ability to conduct their affairs across the world without reference to nationality, government authority, time of day or physical environment. These activities may be commercial, financial, religious, cultural, social or political; nothing is barred. Technological advances in global communications have made globalisation possible, while the fact of globalisation itself is to be seen in the contemporary surge in human activities conducted globally. The effects of these activities on the whole range of humanity's expectations, systems and structures have been and are a heady mixture: they have come and keep coming at different paces in different places; sometimes they create entirely new significant activities; sometimes they share them with older systems and structures; sometimes they induce adaptation but sometimes they erode and destroy. They represent both opportunities and threats."
taken from Richard Langhorne, The Coming of Globalization (2001), chapter 1
Basic information
Beginning from 1 January 2010, the Department of Economics and International Studies has established a Centre for Global Studies. The existence of the Centre recognises the increasing interest in Global Affairs at Buckingham following the successful creation of the MA programme in Global Affairs. New members of staff and visiting lecturers as well as Master's and DPhil students have deepened the presence of the subject area at the University and the Centre is there to provide a central point for all in the University community whose work has a global dimension to it. The Centre is happy to provide a suitable background and address from which to construct grant applications, and to be the host for any meetings or seminars related to Global Affairs that members of the Department and the University may want to hold. Visiting Fellows will be very welcome and the Centre will be glad to enter into co-operative arrangements with other bodies across the world.
At Buckingham, the Centre has become the home of the MA programme in Global Affairs and will form part of a group of Centres which the research and graduate teaching interests of members of the Economics and International Studies Department have created: the Max Beloff Centre for the Study of Liberty and the Centre for Security and Intelligence Studies (BUCSIS). The Centre for Global Studies is also planning to introduce a series of short courses on Global Governance and on other aspects of globalisation in the near future.
Research and teaching in Global Studies
Global Studies have some of the qualities of an iceberg - if you say the word, the picture conjured up suggests a defined object, a sculptured tip, while everybody knows that the real stuff is hidden in the shapeless and dangerous mass below the waterline. The problem for researchers in the field of Global Affairs is that there is no limit to the subjects that are linked in some way or another to global issues, yet it can be very difficult to see the underlying shape of them. From Physics to Political Science, from Zoology to Zen, nobody's interests are untouched.
To stand any chance of making some sense of what is happening, whether across academic disciplines or across the politics and economics of the world, there needs to be a central core to which sometimes remote but often important connections can be made. The first signs of direction in academic terms came with the establishment of the first fully-fledged graduate programme in Global Affairs at Rutgers University in the USA in 1996 and others have followed suit during the following decade, not least at Buckingham in the UK. A multi-disciplinary approach is plainly essential, but merely re-naming what was once called 'international' as 'global' almost inevitably keeps too much of the past. The unifying content in the new Global Studies programmes has proved to be the emphasis on globalisation itself; but, more than that, on the processes of globalisation, where it came from and where it is going, rather than its desirability or otherwise. Of course there is much to be said about the pros and cons of the political and economic responses to the fact of globalisation, but responses should not be attempted nor should they be analysed unless the underlying movement has first been clearly identified. No farmer can make a good harvest out of complaints about the weather, nor a doctor treat a patient successfully by merely regretting the inalienable condition of the human body.
So it is likely that most of the graduate work at the Centre and the research going on among the faculty at large will have a practical tinge to it and very probably find itself at the many new interfaces, geographical, social, economic, political, that globalisation has either brought with it or emphasised; and none more so than the ever trickier interface between the public and private users of political power and influence brought on by re-definitions of the role of the state and the rising importance of civil society.
The full text of Professor Richard Langhorne's inaugural lecture at Buckingham, Globalisation and Democracy (11 May 2010), is available in PDF format: inaugural-lecture.pdf (49 KB).
Contact the Centre for Global Studies for details of the learning and research opportunities available.
See also: