Chapter 1: Introduction
This chapter provides readers with a guide to using Global Politics: A New Introduction as a textbook. We introduce the questions the textbook address and outline how this approach differs from other textbooks, which tend to focus on...
Chapter 2: How do we begin to think about the world?
Asking ‘how do we think’ might sound like a crazy question, but actually it is profoundly political. This chapter explains why thinking is political and outlines how it is political, whilst drawing attention to how certain...
Chapter 3: Why do some people think they know what is good for others?
This chapter examines sixteenth-century Spanish colonialism in the Americas and twenty-first-century American intervention in Afghanistan to consider why some people think they know what is good for others and how this...
Chapter 4: When do we think global politics began?
This chapter questions the idea that global politics has an identifiable beginning, showing that such a claim assumes that we know what counts – and what does not count – as global politics. The chapter uses...
Chapter 5: What if we don't take nature for granted?
This chapter questions the anthropocentric assumptions that shape how ‘we’ think about ‘nature’ and ‘our’ relations to the ‘natural world’. Focusing on forests as an illustrative example, the chapter suggests...
Chapter 6: Can we save the planet?
This chapter does not provide a definitive answer on how to save the planet or clear instructions on what needs to be done. Instead, the chapter outlines how various actors – from dedicated environmental activists through to...
Chapter 7: Who do we think we are?
Our idea of who we think we are is often based on something called identity, which could include national, ethnic, racial, gender, class, sexual or religious identity. To think about the question of identity, this chapter will...
Chapter 8: How do religious beliefs affect politics?
This chapter examines complex questions about how religious beliefs shape global politics, focusing on how different Islamic movements have influenced politics in different places, at different times. In doing so...
Chapter 9: Why do we obey?
This chapter focuses on obedience and disobedience in global politics. It considers why people tend to obey the rules, what it means to resist and how those in charge seek to reassert their authority when...
Chapter 10: How do we find out what's going on in the world?
How do we find out what is going on in the world? This chapter offers three responses. First, it explores the fundamental issue of bias with respect to historical news media representations of war and tracks the contradictory...
Chapter 11: What does AI do to politics?
This chapter considers the relationships between artificial intelligence (AI) and politics in a way that allows us to appreciate both what AI does to politics and what is political about AI. The chapter examines how AI has been used...
Chapter 12: Why is people's movement restricted?
This chapter examines why, in an increasingly interconnected world, people’s movement is still restricted, and it considers how these restrictions limit who is able to move and where these populations can move. Focusing on the...
Chapter 13: Where do we think we are from?
This chapter examines how people come to identify with nations, focusing specific attention on how nationalist discourses in China have addressed questions of cultural difference and common origins. Traditional approaches...
Chapter 14: Does the nation-state work?
Modern political thinking has been absorbed in, if not wholly exhausted by, two closely interrelated historical trajectories. One was the process of state formation, the other that of nation-building. As a result, modern...
Chapter 15: How is the world organised economically?
This chapter examines how the world is organised economically. Rather than assuming that the current economic structure is somehow pre-ordained, the chapter traces how the global economy is continually structured by competing...
Chapter 16: How does colonialism work?
This chapter focuses on the history and impact of colonialism, suggesting that it is the main reason for the contemporary divide between first and third worlds. Using the British in India as an illustrative example, the chapter...
Chapter 17: Do colonialism and slavery belong to the past?
Colonialism and slavery are often imagined to be problems from our past, but this chapter shows how colonialism and slavery continue to impact the global present. The chapter focuses on Côte d’Ivoire, which was a French colony...
Chapter 18: How does finance affect the politics of everyday life?
This chapter examines how finance affects the politics of everyday life and how the financialisaton of the everyday is often obscured until it is disrupted. Using the Global Finance Crisis in 2007–2008 as an illustrative example...
Chapter 19: How can we end poverty?
This chapter considers why poverty remains so persistent in global politics, and it critically assesses the solutions that are meant to eradicate global poverty. Using modernisation and microfinance in South Asia as an...
Chapter 20: Why does politics turn to violence?
This chapter argues that violence is a complex and diverse phenomenon and that even determining what can be labelled as violence is contested and that its meaning has changed over time. It cautions against seeing violence...
Chapter 21: What makes the world dangerous?
This chapter introduces the analytical tools needed to answer the question: what makes the world dangerous? Rather than assuming that there is a ready-made list of potential dangers that can be ranked in order of their dangerousness...
Chapter 22: Can we move beyond conflict?
This chapter examines one of the oldest and most difficult political problems: how to deal with conflicts that are so deeply entrenched that they seem virtually inevitable. It considers how societies that have been torn apart by war...
Chapter 23: Who has rights?
This chapter traces the ambiguities and contradictions that haunt the human rights discourse, which claims to be universal, but makes human beings subjects of a particular political community. The chapter examines the French...
Chapter 24: Conclusion: What can we do to change the world?
Our dissatisfaction with the current state of the world often translates into a desire to change the world. This chapter considers how we might respond to the various problems we encounter in global politics, but it also contends...