Globalization and Politics. Volume III, Political Critiques and Social Theories of the Global

There are many different approaches to the study of globalization. This simple point testifies at once to the vitality of the field of global studies, but also to the contested and diverse nature of contemporary social theory. Alongside this diversity of theory in general, the range of approaches to the global is difficult to categorize into straightforward theoretical lineages. This is in part precisely because the intellectual climate in which most of the studies of globalization emerged was one of fundamental fracturing across many different fields. Studies of globalization and, more generally, studies in the broad and loosely defined field of global studies, became conscious of themselves as such during the 1990s" and this was the time during which the direct-line lineages of classic social theory were being broken or at least segmented.