Saturday, December 16, 2006

New Journal: New Global Studies

Submissions are sought for a new journal, New Global Studies, edited by Nayan Chanda, Yale University, Akira Iriye, Harvard University and Bruce Mazlish, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This journal is interdisciplinary and it may be a promising venue to move beyond questions of globalization and "internationalization" within particular disciplines. It should be of interest to legal historians pursuing global and transnational methodologies. Here's a description of the journal's aims:
Local, universal, world-historical, world-systemic, or global historiographies as well as work in sociology, anthropology and international relations have shed increasing light on the common history of humankind. Only comparatively recently, however, has human global self-awareness broken through the confines of scholarly specialization, and begun to enter the everyday popular life, action, psyche, imagination and consciousness on a mass, global scale. The step into space and the resultant view of the planet, the new computer and media technologies of mass communication, the global spread of multinational corporations and human rights, the unprecedented environmental changes and challenges, the promise and threat of nuclear power and explosions, all have led to the increasing self-experiencing of the globe as a "spaceship earth."
Many scholars and policy makers from different areas and academic disciplines have directed their efforts to trying to understand globalization. These efforts tend to be piecemeal and specialized, staying within particular disciplinary boundaries. This journal exists to address the process going on around us as a whole, and developing over time. It addresses globalization with a holistic perspective, a perspective that gives us a view on the past and present of the globalizing phenomena that will be invaluable to all who seek to comprehend this fundamental aspect of our society and its development.
Our focus is unabashedly on the new globalization that has manifested itself so vigorously in the period starting sometime after World War II. Starting from this relatively contemporary perspective, we are fully aware that the new globalization process, or processes, is on a spectrum with earlier forms of globalization. There are deep roots in the past that must be explored along with attention to the present flowering of the concept, when the idea of globalization became a conscious matter, partly suggested by the widespread use of the term itself.
Nevertheless, and in contrast with most historical journals, our primary emphasis is on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Our field of interest is both multidisciplinary and global rather than particular in that we are concerned with contemporary globalization per se and not merely with the extent to which it (or its progenitors) has had an impact at specific conjunctures. Thus New Global Studies interprets globalization with a historical and sociological angle as opposed to history or sociology with a global angle.

For more, click here.