070216 SE Research Seminar Global History - Globalization and Critique of Globalization (2020S)

DIE ARBEITSSPRACHE RICHTET SICH NACH DEN BEDÜRFNISSEN DER TEILNEHMENDEN (DEUTSCH UND/ODER ENGLISCH); SPRACHE SOLL KEIN AUSSCHLIESSUNGSGRUND SEIN

The rise of Global History as a historical discipline went along with intensification and acceleration of global economic, migration and information flows in the last third of the 20th century. It has been practising a selective perspective. It focused the “global village” and often neglected regions and social groups that face marginalization, pauperization or peripheralization in the course of global integration.

In contrast, this seminar will look at globalization from the following perspectives: Critique of the polarizing effects (into losers and winners) of global expansion, resistance, strategies a well as realized projects of alternative development. It will listen people’s protests against colonization and inequality as well as critical voices from science, literature, social and political movements. Research questions and seminar papers may be located within the 16th and the 21st c., including actual and future perspectives in all parts of the world.

Similar to globalization, critique and alternative concepts faces cycles of down and upswing, contraction and expansion. On the one hand projects focus on local and regional development and how regional integration can be protected or re-appropriated against global penetration and competition; on the other the focus is on transforming international inequality, global redistribution and relations of global justice. PAN-projects (federations and unions, e.g. Bolivarism, Panafricanism, Afroasianism, Soviet Unions, Balkan Conferations, various Internationalisms e.g. International and Global Trade Unions etc.) coexist with SMALL-projects of local self-defence and liberation (e.g. Qilombos, liberated zones, community projects, soviet republics, autonomous and self-governed companies etc.). We will be open for the diversity of protest, critique and strategies. By using methods of comparison and entanglement we will relate them to different forms and periods of territorialization, de-territorialization and re-territorialization of global capitalism.