The “Global” in Political Theory

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

The “global” operates as a master category of contemporary intellectual life. It’s deployed as much as a scalar descriptor as a codeword for various theoretical aspirations and has generated novel approaches to transnational connections and exchanges, opening up newer perspectives and questions. It is no longer sufficient to think of germinal concepts such as justice, equality, and sovereignty in terms of the discipline’s inherited dichotomy of the national and the international; their normative boundaries have become coterminous with that of the global. Similarly, the advent of the Anthropocene and the exigencies of climate change has led the urgent inquiry into the globe as a unified whole, physically, politically, and in the realm of imagination. Above all, the global is understood to be a virtue, conceptual as well as methodological.

The formation and meaning of the category of the global, however, have been critically understudied. It’s almost always viewed through what it qualifies as an adjective (global history, global justice, global commons). While it stands in for connections across distant regions and ideas, it also aspires to escape the Eurocentrism or, rather, the provincialism underlying a great deal of modern political-theoretic scholarship. Such tendencies are evident in calls to expand the canon of political theory and recognize the salient contributions of non-European political thinkers. Even when the universalizing tendencies of the global come under attack—from indigenous perspectives, for instance—the critiques articulate omni-local solidarities.

In this panel, we hope to explore these theoretical issues and challenges by reflecting primarily on the historical formation of the idea of the global itself. First, we reassess how the questions raised by the economic and intellectual transformation of the world since the era of European imperialism coalesced under the category of the global. Second, if the imperial or capitalist unification of the globe did not simply expand the scalar scope of a pre-existing set of political ideas, then what exactly was novel about the new political ideas and visions that emerged in its wake? Finally, what were the distinctive markers of the literary representations of the global and how did those representations help fashion emancipatory, utopian, and internationalist political projects?

Nazmul Sultan’s contribution takes up the question of the substantive content of the global in the political-theoretic imagination by revisiting a founding text in the history of Indian political thought, Biman Behari Majumdar’s History of Political Thought: From Rammohun to Dayananda (1934). Sultan’s reading of Majumdar reveals how the location of Indian and non-European political thought on a global map required the centrality of a temporal framing, the question of global location emerging invariably as a question of time as that of space. Sultan aims, in turn, to take our imagination of the global beyond the recurring paradox of unity combined with hierarchy.

Benjamin McKean investigates the idea of the global through the lens of climate change. He asks whether planetary concerns can escape the double bind of universalizing particularities while at the same time subsuming difference. By way of Adorno’s call for a self-conscious global subject and Andreas Malm’s appeals to engaged political action, McKean argues that some possibilities remain in the construction of an ecosocial global subject that might yet avert the environmental disasters in our horizon.

Emma Mackinnon turns to a mid-twentieth-century idea of the global through the thought and action of Ralph Bunche. By advocating a specific understanding of political science aimed at the decolonizing world, Bunche sought to reconcile his critique of empire with developmentalist approach to transitions from colonialism. To reorder the world, Mackinnon argues, Bunche found a way to bring together trusteeship and peacekeeping as the means to postcolonial management while supplying the same as an antidote to racial domination. This is a vision of the global—and our discipline—we still inhabit today and one that demands a keener scrutiny.

Finally, Anurag Sinha’s paper asks how political theorists might consider the idea of global coproduction more seriously. Focusing on interactions between British imperial agents and their South Asian subjects on issues of property rights and tax collection, Sinha points to reformulations in political and economic categories that could only result from negotiations in such imperial settings. While historians and political theorists have increasingly posited the agency of the subaltern, they are still counted as external to the production of ideas that are thought to be purely European. “Global” political theory only becomes operative once we recognize that interactions and connections since the eighteenth century makes it impossible for us to legitimately claim processes of intellectual production to be exclusively British, Indian, German, European, etc.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• The Global Coproduction of Ideas - Anurag Sinha, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

• “The Global” in the Global History of Political Thought - Nazmul S. Sultan, University of British Columbia

• Ralph Bunche on Political Science and the Management of Decolonization - Emma Stone Mackinnon, Cambridge University

• Theorizing Climate Change as a Global Problem - Benjamin McKean, Ohio State University

Chair

• Anurag Sinha University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Discussant

• Giulia Oskian Yale University