Globalizations

December 2004, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 344 – 350

Global Studies Manifesto1

FRED W. RIGGS
University of Hawaii

Far-reaching transformations in the contemporary world system make a new paradigm for
academic teaching and research necessary, but deeply entrenched traditional ways of thinking
block the needed changes. To overcome resistance and take advantage of the opportunities
and challenges posed by globalization, new ways of conceptualizing the academic enterprise
and generous funding by private foundations and government are both needed. Without them
we will continue to stumble and remain victims of deeply ingrained stereotypes. To appreciate
the nature of the present challenge and to actualize what needs to be done we must (1) under-
stand the historical basis for our established modes of thinking, (2) visualize possibilities that
are evolving in today’s world, and (3) develop strategies for moving forward by globalizing
Global Studies.

Understanding the Historical Basis of the Present Situation

Academic disciplines evolved in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a Euro-
American phenomenon anchored in research and teaching specializations determined by the
highly differentiated structure of Western societies. Academic departments and sub-disciplines
proliferated and generated a mounting flood of dissertations and seminars, each of which looked
more and more intensively at narrower and narrower ranges of phenomena. Our contemporary
universities are still anchored fundamentally on these disciplinary foundations.
Area studies emerged as inter-disciplinary specializations following the collapse of the major
commercial – industrial empires (British, French, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese) after the Second
World War. This transformation exposed the vast ignorance of Western (or US) universities in
dealing with the ancient civilizations and peoples of Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Latin
America. A huge outpouring of money from the US government and private foundations,
especially the Ford Foundation, generated a growing number of Area Studies programs,
staffed by a host of graduate students and faculty.

Correspondence Address: Fred W. Riggs, Political Science Department, University of Hawaii, 2424 Maile Way,
Honolulu, HI 96822, USA. Email: fredr@hawaii.edu.
1474-7731 Print=1474-774X Online=04=020344– 7 # 2004 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080=1474773042000308659
 Global Studies Manifesto 345

Although they maintained links with their disciplinary foundations, a new set of Area Studies
Associations, and within certain universities, a set of nationally subsidized centers and programs
for the study of selected world areas, e.g. China, Japan, Korea, Southeast Asia, South Asia, the
Middle East, Africa and Latin America took shape during the second half of the twentieth
century.
The new area specializations overlaid without displacing established disciplines. They relied
on split appointments and double-listing of courses to provide a core staff of area specialists aug-
mented by a host of affiliated faculty whose primary loyalties remained to their disciplinary
departments.
Global studies, however, remain nascent. Yet they need to be seen as a true wave of the future,
anchored in the profound transformations taking place in academia around the world. A third
layer of academic programs needs to be superimposed on both area- and discipline-based depart-
ments in order to enable scholars of the future to gain a holistic understanding of the profound
changes in the world that have happened during the last decades. These changes have several
dimensions that call for recognition.

Movements
This includes the rise of indigenous movements and scholarship all around the world. In all the
‘ex-colonies’ new universities and institutes have arisen in which Western-trained academics
have more or less uneasily re-created Western university departments and courses modeled
on those of Europe and North America. Increasingly, however, their leaders and a new
generation of locally trained scholars embrace indigenization as a necessary reaction based
on the irrelevance and need for paradigm shifts in which imported models no longer seem
appropriate or adequate. New movements oriented to glocalization—the effort to re-think
and develop authentic local ways of thinking and acting that are responsive to global
challenges—can now be found in almost every country of the world. Glocal scholarship is
not simply local. It strives to restore and revive local traditions and modes of thinking, but
always with a view to adaptation and novelty oriented to what these scholars have learned in
the West. For glocal movements, Global Studies will become a framework for anchoring
their own distinctive glocal programs. Indigenization, therefore, should not be seen as a naive
nativistic rebellion against the West. Rather, it involves creative new synergies, efforts to find
ways to harmonize and build on ancient traditions as they have adapted to new forces generated
by today’s world system.

Global Studies
The hesitant response of Western universities to the global challenge can be seen in the lagging
evolution of Global Studies as a recognizable movement. One encouraging response can be seen
in the recent formation of the Global Studies Association in North America and the UK.2 The
GSA was first created in 1999 and seeks to understand the world as a whole. A movement is
now also well under way to create a new international consortium, The Globalization Studies
Network,3 to foster the growth and linkage of a large number of globalization and global
studies research (and teaching) programs in the coming years The motives for creating these
new associations rests on a clear recognition of the wave of the future.
346 F. W. Riggs

Possibilities Evolving in Today’s World

All that exists today needs to be seen as foundational. We cannot replace what already exists, but
we can build upon it. That means that in the academic world, the established disciplinary depart-
ments and area studies programs should be seen as resources rather than as liabilities. However,
their inadequacies for understanding the contemporary globalized world system also need to be
recognized. Our challenge, therefore, is to visualize feasible options for building on this foun-
dation to create new superstructures that can more realistically understand the gestalt of a
dynamic world system that continuously shapes and re-shapes its constituent parts. No doubt
in each university’s concrete set-up the solutions will differ, but a few general observations
applicable to many of them seem to be justified. They involve three legs of the academic
tripod: leadership, technology and infrastructure.

Leadership
Presidents, chancellors and deans play a decisive role in any university. Their ability to grasp the
new realities and support changes that support them is crucially important. If academic leaders
fail to understand the momentous implications of the contemporary global transformation, they
will assume a business-as-usual posture in which system-maintenance and budgetary woes dom-
inate their thinking. Important associations for university administrators, such as the Inter-
national Association of University Presidents,4 include the following aims on their website:

. to improve competence and knowledge globally and in distinct parts of the world
. to increase mutual understanding, tolerance and respect between peoples
. to create instruments and form attitudes that can reduce conflicts in the world and contribute to
a more peaceful global society.

Through this and other such channels it may be possible to help academic leaders in many
universities grasp the challenges posed by globalization, and share experience in developing
strategies to help their institutions respond more effectively to its challenges.

Technology
One of the driving forces for globalization is the information revolution represented by the
global penetration of the World Wide Web. Admittedly its penetration in some countries and
social groups is much more complete than in others, but the process is continuing and people
not served by the Web today may be served in the near future. The ability of the Web to link
individuals in any part of the world is truly transformational, and this is especially true in the
domain of higher education. University courses traditionally taught by one professor in a phys-
ical classroom can now be team taught by panels composed of faculty members drawn from
many different disciplines and world areas, using the technology now referred to as Distributed
Learning.5
Globalization now requires a radical transformation of the distance learning model. Teams of
teachers with different disciplinary and area studies backgrounds can join together to teach
courses designed to give students a broader-based understanding of the many causes and conse-
quences of globalization as it affects their daily lives. Because this kind of interactive discourse
in a new medium requires a paradigm shift in the way faculty members teach, and because the
 Global Studies Manifesto 347

administrative implications of team teaching for departmental budgets are problematical, it is

apparent that radical changes are needed: faculty members need to accept the implications of
teaching in a new way, and top administrators need to adjust the way they shape their
budgets and guide their staff and faculties. Pilot projects are needed to demonstrate the values
involved in this new approach, especially to provide viable examples of team teaching by dis-
tributed technology. Moreover, of course, the same materials that can be used on a single campus
can potentially also be made available on any other campus in our global system. This radical
expansion of the scope of instructional resources makes it possible to think of a future global
consortium of universities whose members can offer students courses on many dimensions of
globalization as they impinge on their lives in a wide variety of very different locations. In
summary, the new technology generated by computing and the Internet now support new
ways of teaching that can supplement and strengthen all the traditional modes of academic
instruction.

Infrastructure
What organizational changes will be needed to support the kinds of innovations discussed
above? Financial support provides the foundation for organizational structure, and in most uni-
versities this hinges on a basic distinction between hard and soft money. Hard money, whether
from legislative or private (especially endowment) sources permits the employment of tenured
faculty and anchors disciplinary departments, plus overhead administrative costs. Soft money,
by contrast, cannot support long-term employment and so, although widely available for
research on salient problems, leads to temporary jobs and transient organizational structures.
Most funding agencies are willing to be generous with support for projects likely to discover
solutions to pressing problems, but unwilling to make the long-term commitments required to
create tenured positions. The dichotomy between discipline-oriented departments and
problem-oriented research progams is strongly reinforced by this financial constraint. It effec-
tively blocks inter-disciplinary cooperation by faculty members in teaching and research, and
marginalizes the temporary researchers who staff most of the truly relevant research. This
bed-rock financial reality hampers the emergence of any programs that call for multi-disciplin-
ary cooperation. That was certainly true for the ear of area studies which depended heavily on
outside funding and were normally able to recruit only a skeleton staff, depending heavily on the
assistance of faculty affiliates scattered about in many disciplinary departments. Sometimes
short-term joint appointments were possible to launch cooperation between area and disciplinary
programs, but when the funding evaporated, difficult choices often had to be made. This essen-
tially precarious infrastructure will be perpetuated in Global Studies if they are launched on the
same financial basis as were existing Area Studies programs. Fortunately, the new technology
supported by computing and the Internet, if reinforced by creative leadership, now offers
hope for the dawn of a new era in which distributed learning and global networking will trans-
form university life and enable Global Studies to thrive as a pinnacle enterprise. How this might
be done will be outlined in the speculations that follow.

Develop Strategies for Moving Forward: Globalizing Global Studies

Three foundational components of a new strategy for globalizing Global Studies at any univer-
sity need to be considered: networking, organization and funding.
348 F. W. Riggs

Networking
The ubiquitous character of computerization and Internetting now supports a new framework for
both teaching and research. Team teaching using distributed learning technology will enable
faculty groups whose members share an interest in any selected topic to discourse before a
class and generate relevant discourse. The materials produced in this manner will include not
only textbooks and printed materials but also linked documents available on the Web and
filmed materials posted as streaming video on the Internet. Increasingly, university libraries
are being computerized so that ordinary users will automatically discover relevant materials
electronically and will spend less time hunting for printed texts in library stacks. A comprehen-
sive system for collecting and distributing educational materials on the Web has been created at
the University of Washington under the name ‘Digital Well’.6
Global sharing of teaching materials for Global Studies will overcome an inherent limitation
of soft money funding which is often available for research themes like Globalization, but it
cannot support the long term employment of tenured faculty. Hence finding ways to employ
faculty members with inter-disciplinary competence who are globally oriented is difficult and
this explains in part why so many universities sponsor globalization research yet still find it
hard to gain support for the complementary teaching of Global Studies.
Global networking provides an environment in which Global Studies will evolve as a global
enterprise. That means that the essential limitations experienced by any new field of study will
be overcome, in part at least, by the globalization of Global Studies. This will be an interactive
process: work produced and networked on any one campus will become widely available else-
where; and the development of Global Studies at any university will benefit from parallel devel-
opments elsewhere in the world. This structural difference will support a major transformation in
academia.
These are new possibilities and many variations are possible. They contrast with the relative
isolation and campus-centered modes of teaching and research that have long characterized the
academic disciplines and Area Studies. Globalization is itself the transformational context for
launching Global Studies as a truly innovative force that can both overlay and revitalize both
the disciplines and area studies that preceded it.

Organization
A perplexity for Area Studies programs has always involved organizational problems. In the
context of many disciplinary departments how could a new interdisciplinary program thrive?
Should it recruit and finance a new cadre of teachers and researchers in parallel with existing
departments, or could it thrive in some kind of partnership relationship with them? Various
uneasy compromises have been established, but all were hampered by the limitations of tra-
ditional technology and short-term financing. As a result, they often had a core faculty, often
seconded from disciplinary departments, and they relied heavily on cooperation by faculty affili-
ates whose basic security hinged on their departmental appointments. This has meant that,
despite generous external funding by foundations and government, Area Studies programs
have remained essentially marginal in the organizational structure of universities. If Global
Studies programs were to be created on this model, as simply a new macro-area, they would
assuredly be doomed to a similar fate. We may hope that in the new climate of urgent globaliza-
tion, a new organizational formula can be found for Global Studies. For it to succeed, it will
require a firm alliance with existing area studies programs. Therefore the pairing of globalization
 Global Studies Manifesto 349

and regionalization provides a helpful device. All existing area studies programs can be included
under this rubric in addition to an explicitly global program. However, the implications of regio-
nalization by contrast with regions needs to be noted. All regions of the world have now been
stretched by globalization. Diasporization is ubiquitous. Koreans no longer live just in Korea,
nor Tibetans in Tibet, nor Americans in America, Chinese in China or Iraqis in Iraq. Indeed,
every nation can now be viewed as a global community, and residents of every country are
increasingly multi-ethnic or multi-national. In this context, all established areas of the world
have become globalized and glocalized and are experiencing indigenization or regionalization
movements. Area Studies, including American and European Studies, need therefore to be
reconceptualized under the rubric of Global Studies. The phenomena and scope of these pro-
blems are so vast and commanding that they call for recognition on grounds of equality with
all established disciplines. Instead of subsuming them under humanities or social sciences, or
creating ‘Affiliate Faculty’ status for persons with joint appointments, each Area or Global
Studies program should now be (re)established in independent colleges, schools or departments
of the university.
Globalization means not only the global movement of information and curricular materials
but also global human mobility: increasingly both faculty and students will cross state bound-
aries to teach and study in many different countries. We have traditionally viewed ‘International
Programs’ in isolated pockets: not only segregated organizationally from teaching and research,
but also compartmentalized geographically: one became an ‘Area specialist’ by virtue of long-
term study and residence abroad. Under the impact of accelerated globalization, the time has
come to transform this paradigm. In today’s world, students and faculty, working in teams,
can travel widely, live and work for shorter periods in contexts where they study and research
with partners in host institutions around the world. The rise of good universities in virtually
every country of the world now makes this possible, and increasingly many universities have
already entered into partnerships with others around the globe seeking to link study abroad
with teaching and research that is globally oriented. Exchange programs should not therefore
be seen as an end in themselves, but rather as essential tools in Global Studies to support experi-
ences that deepen understanding of the world and its complexity. Organizationally, these efforts
need to be managed in the main stream of academic life, at the heart of the university and its
disciplines rather than as a merely exotic outlier. Global Studies should enjoy the same kind
of long term financial support that the established academic disciplines and Area Studies
have long secured.

Funding
All of this will cost money and a major stumbling block for the development of Global Studies
can be attributed to the failure of any major foundations or government agencies to step forward
with counterparts to the kind of energetic support that empowered the rise of area studies after
the Second World War. There was widespread recognition of the importance for the United
States and other industrialized countries of learning about and also helping the new states that
sprang to life on the ashes of collapsed empires. In the wake of 9/11 and the end of the Cold
War, we need a new awakening in the foundations and by governments that would support a
wide range of activities along the lines identified in this manifesto. A major commitment of
funds to support coordinated and internationally based teaching and research on globalization
and its implications appears to be a necessity if we are not to fall into a morass caused by our
own essential ignorance about the dynamics of our highly interdependent world.
350 F. W. Riggs

Conclusion
The declaration on ‘Building the Information Society: A Global Challenge in the New Millen-
nium’ written in Geneva from 10– 12 December 2003 for the first phase of the World Summit on
the Information Society declared a
common desire and commitment to build a people-centred, inclusive and development-oriented
Information Society, where everyone can create, access, utilize and share information and knowl-
edge, enabling individuals, communities and peoples to achieve their full potential in promoting
their sustainable development and improving their quality of life, premised on the purposes and prin-
ciples of the Charter of the United Nations and respecting fully and upholding the Universal Declara-
tion of Human Rights.7

It would be redundant to reproduce here a wide range of similar expressions of the spirit of
globalization as found in similar documents readily available on the Web today. What is import-
ant, however, is the challenge they pose for policy makers in Washington and other world capi-
tals, and to university leadership across the globe. Will we respond positively and with real
financial resources to the opportunity now open to us to support global initiatives that could
lead to a better world, or will we continue to pump resources into spider hole projects that
are likely to make the world an increasingly dangerous place? This is, indeed, a terrible
dilemma and this manifesto is a call for the right choices to be made. The opportunity looms
ahead and it can lead to a better world, but only if we make the right choices in the coming
months and years.

Notes
1 For the full text of the original draft of this manifesto, see khttp://webdata.soc.hawaii.edu/fredr/GSfesto.html.
2 For GSA/UK see khttp://www.sociology.mmu.ac.uk/gsa/welcome.htmll, and for GSA/North America see
khttp://www.net4dem.org/maygloball.
3 For Globalization Studies Network see khttp:www.gstudynet.coml.
4 See khttp://www.ia?up.org/iaupinfo.htm#missionl.
5 Information about this technology can be found in a variety of sources listed at: khttp://webdata.soc.hawaii.edu/
fredr/UHsites.htm#disl.
6 See khttp://digitalwell.orgl.
7 For the full text see khttp://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu?s/md/03/wsis/doc/S03?WSIS?DOC?0004!!PDF?E.pdfl.

Fred W. Riggs is professor emeritus in political science, University of Hawaii. Since retiring
from teaching, he has been promoting an understanding of political and administrative problems
usually ignored by comparativists through numerous papers and publications, plus the launching
of a global network of concerned scholars and practitioners: the Committee on Viable Cons-
titutionalism (COVICO). He has recently focused his energy on the increased violence of
ethnic nationalism around the world and the need for viable constitutional democracy in
order to replace civil war with non-violent politics. He has organized a global network for
liaison officers of the major groups, organizations and committees promoting research on
ethnic problems, and has created a Web site to support this activity. Most recently, he has
been studying globalization as a contemporary process with far-reaching causes and conse-
quences, especially in relation to the problems of democratization as it evolves when military
authoritarianism or one-party dictatorship collapses—see DEMOGLO and the Forum for
Global Studies.