Imperial globalism, democracy and the 'political turn'

The last decade saw the meteoric rise of a new research paradigm exploring the complex transnational social processes nested under the epithet "globalization." Global studies departments and globalization research centers sprang up around the world, providing a new intellectual home for academics committed to interdisciplinary approaches to the subject. Although today's leading globalization scholars remain divided over the utility of various methodological strategies, there has been a noticeable convergence on the following four positions: (1) thickening global networks of interdependence can be documented empirically; (2) globalization is a long-term historical process that, over many centuries, has crossed distinct qualitative thresholds; (3) representations of the "global" require multiple geographical scales; ( 4) dominant economic-technological approaches need to be complemented by normative explorations of the political and cultural-ideological aspects of globalization.