Introducing Global Politics

How should we approach the study of world affairs? How is the world best understood? World affairs have traditionally been understood on the basis of an international paradigm. In this view, states (often understood as ‘nations’, hence ‘international’) are taken to be the essential building blocks of world politics, meaning that world affairs boil down, essentially, to the relations between states. This suggests that once you understand the factors that influence how states interact with one another, you understand how the world works. However, since the 1980s, an alternative globalization paradigm has become fashionable. This reflects the belief that world affairs have been transformed in recent decades by the growth of global interconnectedness and interdependence. In this view, the world no longer operates as a disaggregated collection of states, or ‘units’, but rather as an integrated whole, as ‘one world’. Global politics, as understood in this book, attempts to straddle these rival paradigms. It accepts that it is equally absurd to dismiss states and national government as irrelevant in world affairs as it is to deny that, over a significant range of issues, states now operate in a context of global interdependence. However, in what sense is politics now ‘global’? And how, and to what extent, has globalization reconfigured world politics? Our understanding of global politics also needs to take account of the different theoretical ‘lenses’ though which the world has been interpreted; that is, different ways of seeing the world.