Week 2: Reading Notes

Day 1:

Darian-Smith and McCarty

I. New Solutions to New Problems

• climate change, economic development, regional violence, and resource depletion are among new issues that call for innovative, perhaps previously unthinkable solutions.

• Saskia Sassen argues currently confronted w/ “limits in our current master categorizations,” → fail to see beyond what we recognize and assume to be important

• need to look for and “detect conceptually subterranean trends that cut across our geopolitical divisions” + open up new ways of seeing, confronting, analyzing, and interpreting the world

II. New Solutions to Old Problems

• look at problems that have been ignored

• powerful countries can act unilaterally and smaller countries cannot

• limitations hinder development of strong multilateral institutions like ICC → destabilizing geopolitical order and increasing tendency towards both regional conflict and violence by non-state actors

• general understanding of how world is organized and functions is nation-state’s taken for granted status as container of political, economic, and cultural activities

• need to remove anachronistic international relations → identify integrate and analyze global structures, system forces, and regulatory issues that operate both above and below the level of the nation-state

• nation states needed

III. Powerful Analytical Tools

• situating local-global continuum in deep historical contexts, global studies has potential to reveal temporal, spatial, and conceptual connections we could not otherwise have seen or even imagined.

• Teaching the next generation of scholars to reach beyond national-
  ism to embrace the wider humanity, and encouraging them to think seri-
  ously about the possibilities of global citizenship, can transform their fun-
  damental understanding of the individual’s role in society and our
  collective place in the world