Why Global

8/12/2019 Why Global

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Why Global?: Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within aPolitical Economy of Higher Education*

ISAAC KAMOLA

ACLS New Faculty FellowJohns Hopkins University

Department of Political [email protected]

***Revised and Resubmitted to International Political Sociology***

ABSTRACT:This article examines the assumed factuality of globalization in light of its persistentconceptual incoherence. Through a diagnosis of five reoccurring ambiguities withinthe globalization literature, I argue that the concept of globalization lacks anempirical referent. Scholars writing on globalization overcome this absence byasserting that some things (the Internet, McDonalds, etc.) and not others (genocidein Rwanda, refugee camps, etc.) are essentially global. However, who is positionedto decides what gets posited as global, and therefore the foundation for erecting atheory of globalization, is shaped by a highly asymmetrical political economy ofhigher education. Some scholarsusually in North American and Europeanuniversitiesare materially better positioned to produce knowledge about

globalization, especially when compared to colleagues in postcolonial countries. Theseemingly arbitrary positing of some things as global, therefore, should beunderstood as symptoms of the highly unequal social relations in which knowledgeabout globalization is produced.

Keywords:Globalization; production of knowledge; higher education

Isaac Kamola received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Minnesota and iscurrently an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellow at Johns HopkinsUniversity.

* I would like to thank Wesleyan Universitys Center for the Humanities and the Political Sciencedepartment at Johns Hopkins University for housing me as a postdoctoral fellow while I finishedthis article. I am also thankful for the many people who provided important feedback during thewriting process, including: Manfred Steger, Niels van Doorn, Jennifer Erickson, Serena Laws, DanielLevine, Amentahru Wahlrab, Bud Duvall, Lisa Disch, Premesh Lalu, Michael Barnett, AntonioVazquez-Arroyo, Jill Morawski, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Nima Bassiri, Khachig Tllyan, and twoanonymous reviewers at IPS. This project was completed with generous support from the AmericanCouncil of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellows program.


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Why Global?: Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within aPolitical Economy of Higher Education

Today, friends and foes of globalization debate its effects. Both

assume the reality of such a process, which can either be praised orlamented, encouraged or combated. Are we asking the best questionsabout issues of contemporary importance when we debateglobalization?

Frederick Cooper, Colonialism in Questions(2005)

During the 1990s and early 2000s globalization emerged as a salient and even indispensable

term for describing contemporary social, political, and economic life. Within the academy a now vast

literature has cemented globalization as an important buzzword (Steger, 2003, 1-2; Hay and

Marsh, 2000, 1) and a concept that penetrate[s] the discourse of all social science disciplines

(Hoogvelt, 2001, 121). However, while globalization has become a nearuniversal term

(Robertson and Khondker, 1998, 26), it remains fraught with profound ambiguity and conceptual

confusion. A chorus of scholars recognized that there is no accepted definition of globalization

(Robertson and White, 2007, 54), the term has come to mean many things to many people(Babones, 2007, 144), and includes anything from the Internet to a hamburger (Strange, 1996, xii-

xiii). Furthermore, the failure to pinpoint what globalization is has not challenged the quite solid

agreement that globalization is (Bartelson, 2000). While conceptual ambiguity may not itself be

inherently problematic, this persistent slippage in the globalization literature actual works to obscure

a deeply structured inequality within the political economy of higher education, one that shapes who

does (and does not) determine what counts as global.

Taking inspiration from Bartelsons claim that understanding how globalization emerged as a

social fact requires first [u]nderstanding the ambiguity of the concept of globalization itself

(Bartelson, 2000, 181), this essay argues that the persistent absence of conceptual clarity within the


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incommensuratebecomes posited as a single, coherently global thing (even if then

problematized as heterogeneous and contradictory under the banner of globalization). I then argue

that what does, and does not, get deemed global is profoundly shaped by a deeply asymmetrical

political economy of higher education. For example, while American research universities have

become particularly productive sites for producing knowledge about globalization, many African

postcolonial universities face considerable material austerity and marginalization, thereby making it

difficult for scholars to compete within an increasingly marketized field of knowledge production.2I

conclude by examining how the unquestioned claim that the world is global continues to have

effects even after academic debates around globalization theory have cooled down. In particular, I

examine how various theories of world society continue to rely on an unquestioned, and

asymmetrically produced, concept of the global. Situating academic efforts to conceptualize the

social whole within a political economy of higher education makes it possible to ask: What do we

mean when we say global? Who is this we? And, how can the global be pronounced

differently by a different and extended we?

Diagnosing the Globalization Literature

Given all the ink spilled on the topic since the 1990s, the persistent lack of a clear

conceptualization of globalization can no longer be attributed to intellectual malpractice.3Rather, the

2My focus on African universities in the article stems both from personal research interests as wellas from the fact that African universities have historically been some of the most marginalized

within the world of higher education. Additional research should examine how knowledge aboutglobalization is produced differently within other marginalized sites of knowledge production,including universities in Central Asia, South Asia, Latin America, branch campuses in the MiddleEast, or even American community and technical colleges.3Social scientists are no strangers to contentious concepts containing multiple and competingdefinitions. However, the lack of a consensus surrounding globalization is so profound that much ofthe literature starts by lamenting its ambiguity (Bartelson, 2000, 181). An informal survey of bookson globalization, for example, reveals that many of them start, in the first sentence, with the observationthat: globalization is one of the, if not the, most controversial issues inacademic discussions


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absence of a coherent understanding should be read as symptomatic4of the literatures dependency

upon an assumed global to underwrite globalizations appearance of conceptual coherence. Re-

reading the literature with an eye towards its various constitutive elements makes it possible to

identify what remains unsaid, yet necessary, for the concept of globalization to hang together. In

ways diagnosed below, the literature requires asserting the existence of an unspoken, yet necessary,

objectthe globalto which the freewheeling and expansive concept of globalization refers.

Diagnosis One: The Unspecified Adjective Global

Globalization often faces a conceptual crisis at the moment it requires a definition. One

common technique for defining globalization involves invoking an otherwise unspecified adjective

global. For example, scholars define globalization in terms of a growing magnitude or intensity of

global flows (Held and McGrew, 2003, 3), as including social effects on a global scale (Busch,

2007, 23), as involving flows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and

peoplevia a global networked society (Kellner, 2002, 287), as associated with an evolving

dynamic global structure (Held et al., 1999), as the process by which societies were brought

together into one global system (Modelski, 2000, 49), and as rather simplythe intensification of

And yet much of this discussion is vague, simplistic, off the mark (Wiarda, 2007a, vii);globalization remains a hotly contested and surprisingly slippery concept (Steger, 2004, 1). Scholtebegins by asking What is globalization? before continuing to point out that the widespread looseuse of the term results in considerable vagueness, inconsistency and confusion (Scholte, 2000, 1).Ritzer points out that many authors find it necessary to define globalization, often in the firstparagraph (2007, 1). In their first paragraph Held et. al. (1999) bemoan the fact that globalizationlacks precise definition and is therefore in danger of becomingthe clich of our time.4

I draw this method of symptomatic reading from Althusser who argues that empiricist conceptionsof knowledge assume that knowledge, like gold, is found only when the outside dirt is removed andthe essence of a thing is made visible (Althusser and Balibar, 1999, 37). Most academic knowledgeabout globalization, in other words, claims the scholars simply discover that the world as alreadyessentially global. However, what empiricist conceptions of globlization assume to bediscovering is actually being produced at the level of the texts unconscious. Because theproduction of knowledge takes place within particular structured material relations (such asuniversities), knowledge necessarily contains various tensions that are effects of the contradictoryrelations in which it is produced.


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global interconnectedness (Inda and Rosaldo, 2008, 7). While there is nothing inherently

problematic in defining globalization in terms of global flows, scales, networks, structures, systems

or interconnectedness, the problem arises when the adjective global remains unexamined,

undefined, and even taken for granted.

Most authors grounding their definition of globalization on this adjective assume that what

makes an object global is self-evident. For example, Robins states that globalization can be

identified where global elements coexist alongside existing and established local and national

cultural forms (Robins, 1996, 19). To describe global elements he provides the hypothetical

example of walking down your local high street and encountering global chains such as

McDonalds or Benetton or buying global products made by Sony, Procter and Gamble or the

Coca-Cola Corporation (Robins, 1996, 14). All these examples beg the question: What exactly is

global about buying a Sony DVD player in Minneapolis, Cairo or Mumbai? Is this different from

buying saffron in London in 1850 or African slaves in Virginia in the 1780s? What about people

without McDonalds restaurants on their local high street or who cannot afford a Sony DVD

player? Are people without access to fast food restaurants, consumer electronics, or international

travel still part of globalization? If so, on what grounds? Are economic crises, wars, famines, or

totalitarian dictatorships that may prevent people from having access to McDonalds or Sony DVD

players also global in nature?

Diagnosis Two: The Global as An Arbitrary List

The arbitrariness concerning what constitutes the global is also apparent when

globalization is explained using an ad hoc list of things, events, places, or people. For example,

Wiarda writes that

Movies, television, computers, the Internet, cell phones, electronics, banking andmoney transfers, modern transportation and communication, and your Blackberry


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and iPod have all contributed[to] globalizationwhile it took hundreds of yearsfor the effects of Columbuss discovery of America to be fully felt, it has taken onlythirty years for Chinas great economic boom to have a global impact on trade andfinancial markets, to say nothing of the global balance of power. (2007b, 3)

The slippage takes place when a list of seemingly equivalent objects (i.e. consumer electronics andcommunication technologies) leads directly to phenomena that are not necessarily equivalent;

through a method of ad hoc juxtaposition ones iPod becomes an extension of Columbuss

discovery of America. While one cannot simply say My iPod is an extension of the exploration of

the New World, one can create this chain of equivalency within a list, thereby making the

comparison appear uncontestable. This, however, begs the question: Why are some things (and not

others) included in this chain of equivalencies?

Producing the global through an arbitrary list is also commonly found in efforts to

quantitatively measure levels of globalization by identifying various indices. For example, the 2010

KOF Index of Globalization5ranks countries in terms of their levels of globalization, with Belgium

and Austria ranking first and second. Interestingly, the Cayman Islands ranks 187 out of 208 despite

housing a significant portion of the worlds off-shore banking accounts. Afghanistan and Iraq are

similarly ranked very low on the globalization index (183rd and 193rd, respectively) despite being

focal points in a Global War on Terror and the sites of massive multi-national military interventions.

What makes trade, foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, telephone traffic, tourism,

internet usage and the per capita number of McDondalds and Ikea stores KOF indicators of

globalization but not, for example, the number of off-shore accounts or foreign troops per capita?

Not only are the global qualities of these objects simply asserted but a different ad hoc listsuch as

5This annual measure of globalization published by ETH University, Zurich, Switzerland, can befound at: http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch/


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one that asserted that off-shore banking accounts, foreign occupation, illegal drug exports and levels

of foreign debt counted as globalwould yield a fundamentally different picture of globalization.6

Diagnosis Three: The Global as Not Local

The global is often produced by first asserting that a particular place or thing is local.

For example, while great ethnographic and historical attention is paid to the specificity of mafias in

Mumbai (Weinstein, 2008), conflicts over mining in Peru (Haarstad and Flysand, 2007) or

conservation policies in Thailand (Buergin, 2003), globalization in these studies becomes everything

not directly present within the case. For example, the World Bank, IMF, multinational corporations,

overseas politicians, and financiers become global merely by being not local [to the case study].

Creating the narrow and tangible confines of the local, in other words, effectively produces the

global as everything else.

The global gets produced as not local even in those works most dedicated to undoing

the local/global dichotomy. For example, Tsing ethnography of global connection starts by raising

a number of methodological questions, including: can one gain an ethnographic purchase on global

connections? Where would one locate the global in order to study it? (Tsing, 2005, 3). She answers

these questions by redefining global forces as congeries of local/global interaction and,

therefore, an ethnography of globalization becomes possible at points of friction, defined as

persistent but unpredictable effects of global encounters across difference (Tsing, 2005, 3). In

other words, an ethnographically knowable global is made visible when it brushes against the

local. Similarly, the term glocalization claims that the spatial dimension of the local make it

possible to capture the necessarilyspatial distribution of that which is being globalized (Robertson

6 The same problem exists for the Foreign Policy Globalization Index (A.T. Kearney, 2001, A.T.Kearney, 2007) as well as other quantifiable measures of globalization (Heshmati, 2006, Vujakovic,2009).


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and White, 2003, 15). The pervasive local/global dichotomy indicates the degree to which scholars

of globalization often need to first assert a clear and stable local as the prism through which the

globaland therefore globalizationcomes into focus. In these cases, however, what counts as

not local is actually the by-product of ones choice of case study.

Diagnosis Four: The World is Global Because Everyone Says it is

The claim that the world is self-evidently global also emerges in those moments when

scholars express doubt about whether globalization has any conceptual coherence at all.7 These

moments of self-doubt are often assuaged by citing the terms common usage. For example, Clark

quickly points out that, while the utility of globalization as a theoretical concept is much

disputed, there nonetheless exists a surprisingly strong consensusthat globalization is an

important concept (Clark, 1997, 16). Rosenau recognizes that people everywhere have come to

expect, to take for granted, that the advance of globalization poses threats to long-standing local and

national ties (Rosenau, 2003, 15). In these and other instances, the invocation of a large majority

also describing the world as global becomes a convenient way to side-step the underlying

incoherence of the concept.

This is particularly problematic given that the common usage of the term is often simply

asserted. For example, Mittelman conducted more than one hundred interviews in Japan, Malaysia,

the Philippines, Singapore, Vietnam, Botswana, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zimbabwe but

found that his interviewees did not respond to the term globalization because the architecture of

globalization is too huge to perceive as a whole. However, by changing the approach to a finer

scalemore discrete issuesthe structures become discernible he found that his informants were

actually discussing globalization even if not using the term (Mittelman, 2000, 12-13). This is not

7See, for example, footnote 3.


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surprising given that Mittelman selected informants he considers to be activists directly or indirectly

challenging global structures (Mittelman, 2000, 13). While common usage of the term globalization

might be prevalent among certain sectors of the worlds population, including American academics,

this does not necessarily mean that everyone uses the term globalization, or even sees the world as

global. Conflating wide-spread academic usage of the term with a universal consensus prevents

asking the question: Why do so many academics begin using the term globalization at a particular

historical moment?

Diagnosis Five: The Global as both Menagerie and Concept

The globalization literature also often vacillates between describing what populates the

global and then offering globalization as the concept, term, or analytical perspective that describes

this already constituted menagerie. In these instances, however, the term globalization describes

both sides of the equation. This is possible because the various components of the menagerie are

already assumed to be global. For example, Koenig-Archibugis introduction to Taming

Globalization starts with the claim that:

During the past decade, globalization has become a lens through which anincreasing number of politicians, business people, journalists, scholars and citizensview and make sense of a changing world. Sweatshop workers in Central America,human rights activists in East Timor, entrepreneurs in transition economies, Inuitthreatened by global warming in their Arctic homelands, HIV-infected people inSouthern Africa, not to mention stockbrokers in London or Tokyo, sense that theirfortunes partly depend on events occurring in distant parts of the globe. The notionof globalization provides a shared vocabulary to express this sense ofconnectednessalthough those affected might well have very different views about

the word and what it conveysEmployers and trade unionists, environmentalistsand polluters, indigenous peoples and multinational corporations, feminists and malechauvinists, fundamentalists and liberals, free traders and protectionists, humanrights activists and authoritarian rulers, nationalists and multilateralists, the Northand the South: all these groups have found that the capacity to achieve their goalsis affected, in one way or another, by the forces of globalization. Consequentlymany of them seek to make sense of this phenomenon (Koenig-Archibugi, 2003,2)


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At first glance this quote offers a richly detailed exposition of globalization. A closer reading,

however, reveals that the lens of globalization not only depends upon the otherwise

unsubstantiated belief that each listed item is, in fact, global but, in addition, Koenig-Archibugi

conflates globalization as lens and globalization as phenomenon.

Koenig-Archibugi starts by recognizing that globalization has received a lot of attention,

implying that there is considerable interest inand anxiety overthe rapidly changing world. He

then contends that people now recognize themselves as pulled together in ways not experienced

before, as illustrated by the list of hypothetical subjectivities becoming aware that their lives are

bound to distant parts of the globe. This new awareness requires a new vocabulary: both the

hypothetical Inuit and a hypothetical South African seek to make sense of this phenomenon. The

shared sense that globalization necessitates the creation of a new lens which thankfully already

exists in the concept globalization. The usefulness of this lens is, in turn, reaffirmed by the fact

that everyone seems to be using it. On the one hand, Koenig-Archibugi posits globalization as a lens

(and later a notion and a vocabulary), which he differentiates from the forces of globalization.

While the phenomenon of globalization affects people differentlyemployers and trade

unionists, feminists and male chauvinists, etc.the lens of globalization makes this complex

thing (globalization) comprehensible to everyone across the globe. The rest of the contenti.e.

the existence of a shared assumption that people at distant parts of the globe are connectedis

simply posited by the author. Koenig-Archibugi after all provides no evidence that sweatshop

workers, human rights activists, entrepreneurs, the threatened Inuit, South Africans, or stock traders

not only use the term globalization but also use it to describe the same phenomena. The mismatched

use of both globalization (no quotes) and globalization (with quotes) is notable in this regard. This

conflation is not merely sloppy but symptomatic of the impossibility of using one word to capture

the existing thing (i.e. forces/phenomena) of globalization and the lens/concept of globalization


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through which this thing is defined. The tension emerges because the concept and the object of

study are actually the same. In short, Koenig-Archibugi simply posits a priori that the world is

global, and then establishes a menagerie in need of a concept.

* * * * *

In each of the above instances, various assertions and conceptual slippages coalesce to

secure the otherwise fragile claim that the world is global. The unspoken insistence that the world

is global makes it possible to force coherence upon what is otherwise incoherent. The assumption

that the world is global, in other words, provides the common referent and undisputed foundation

upon which the concept of globalization gains its patina of conceptual coherence. However, in each

instance, when pushed, it becomes apparent that what counts as global is simply asserted through

a series of arbitrary demarcation of some things (and not others) as global.

Diagnosing an arbitrary global at the foundation of the academic literature on

globalization, however, raises a number of questions. Why the strong scholarly attachment to the

term globalization? What social and psychological need is it fulfilling? Who arbitrarily defines what

counts as global? What material and social conditions make such proclamations possible?

In the next section I argue that because the vast majority of knowledge about globalization is

produced within the American and European universities, it is not entirely surprising that the

Internet, international financial institutions and IKEA stores become considered global but not,

for example, the genocide in Rwanda, refugee camps in Kenya, piracy in the Gulf of Aden,

shantytowns in Braslia, or coltan mining in Eastern Congo. If knowledge about globalization is

predicated on the arbitrary claim that some things are global, one could imagine what would

happen if other people were materially positioned to produce knowledge about globalization. On the

one hand, a globalization literature written (or performed, sung, or narrated) by refugees, pirates,


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slum dwellers or coltan miners would be quite different than the one produced within the world of

higher education. Similarly, one could also imagine a globalization literature that included

proportional contributions from scholars and students trained and working in Africa, Latin America,

Eastern Europe, or Central Asia. In such a literature, one could surmise, what objects are arbitrarily

posited as global would look substantially different.

I should be clear that this argument does not claim that various phenomena currently labeled

as global are not occurring, or are without transformative effects. I am not saying that

unprecedented levels of economic integration, communication, migration, democratization, and

networked civil society are not taking place. However, the assertion that these aspects of the social

totalityand not, say, increasing levels of deprivation, exclusion, border militarization, detention,

repression, and imperial interventionas global actually produces a vision of globalization that

mirrors existing asymmetries in the social relations of academic knowledge production. In the next

section I examine the existing asymmetrical material relations within which academic knowledge is

produced, and how it positions and conditions some scholars (and not others) to produce

knowledge about globalization.

Changing Relations of Academic Knowledge Production

Current shifts in the political economy of higher education have radically transformed how

academic knowledge about the world is produced. In recent years the American-style research

institution has become replicated around the world and become the primary model for how

higher education should be organized (Wildavsky, 2010, 41).8That being said, this dominant vision

of universities as corporate entities operating within an international, and highly competitive,

education market is not the only form higher education institutions can take. One historicaland

8 See, for example, the World Banks efforts to help countries establish world-class universities as part of theireconomic development strategy: (Salmi, 2009).


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often neglectedexample of how academic knowledge can be produced differently is the anti- and

post-colonial African university. During the middle decades of the twentieth century a number of

vibrant intellectual circles produced knowledge about the constitution of the world using terms and

concepts that differ substantially from those currently falling under the banner of globalization.

Rather than arriving at the claim that the world was globalizing, these scholars developed bodies of

literature about the post-colonial world, the Third World, the Pan-African world, and a highly

asymmetrical world-system. Understanding how academics came to conceptualize the world as

global requires examining both the rise of the Western global university as well as the

institutional transformations taking place within African universities themselves.

Rise of the Western Global University

Justin Rosenberg argues that we live today in a veritable age of globalisation studies, in

which one academic discipline after another is gaily expanding its remit into the global sphere and

relocating its own subject matter in a geographically extended, worldwide perspective (Rosenberg,

2000, 11). Within many universities the age of globalization studies is evidenced in the

proliferation of Global Studies departments, programs and majors; the expansion of book series,

edited volumes, readers, journals, conferences, and professional associations dedicated to the topic;

the inclusion of global and globalization in class titles, textbooks, class syllabi, and academic job

postings; and the rebranding of universities and colleges as global. Many institutions, from small

private colleges to large research universities, have globalized their curricula, creating

infrastructures for students to have global experiences, and developed interdisciplinary

programming focused on studying globalization. In terms of scholarly publication, starting in the

mid-1990s globalization became an academic growth industry with the yearly output of articles on

globalization nearly quadrupling, up from single digits in the 1980s (Busch, 2000, 23). While these


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shifts might be thought of as simply responses to changing phenomena outside the university, I

argue that they are also strategic adaptations to a rapidly changing political economy of higher

education.

While social scientists only began studying globalization in the mid-1990s, one should

remember that the concept was first developed in American business schools during the 1980s.

Theodore Levitts groundbreaking 1983 article The Globalization of Markets in the Harvard

Business Reviewargued that while the multinational corporation adjusts its products and practices

depending on the country, the newly coinedglobal corporationoperates with resolute consistencyat

low relative costas if the entire world (or major regions of it) were a single entity. In other words,

Levitt argued that it is cheaper to sell the same things in the same way everywhere (Levitt, 1983,

92-93). This argument amounted to a profound conceptual shift in marketing strategy predicated on

the innovative assumption that companies could develop a worldwide convergence of tastes

rather than cater to existing national markets (Applbaum, 2000, 265). Levitts argument made an

immediate splash as major corporations changed their marketing strategies to develop their global

potential (Applbaum, 2000, 264) and the article quickly become required reading in business

schools across the world (Quelch and Deshpande, 2004, 9). As such, by the time social scientists

began studying globalization in the 1990s they were actually studying the materialized effect of a

conceptual shift developed by their business school colleagues a decade earlier.

Similar changes in economic practice entered the American university during the 1990s and

early 2000s with the arrival of a new financial language imported from the private sector

(Newfield, 2008, 159). During this period many public and private universities engaged in billion-

dollar endowment campaigns and brought new waves of wealthy potential donors onto campus

and made their interests, viewpoints, and concerns central to the academic enterprise (Newfield,

2008, 164). Greater private investment brought changing managerial and administrative styles to


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many universities, including an embrace of responsibility center management (RCM). Under the

label of budget reform, RCM treated various academic units (colleges, schools, units, departments,

etc.) as individual economic units, making each unit responsible for its own expenses (office space,

library privileges, phones, etc.) and revenue (credit hours, grant money, etc.). These various units

were governed by a system of competitive financial incentives, which included opening departmental

financial records to outside scrutiny and requiring programs to defend their existence in market

terms (Newfield, 2008, 165-72).

The transformation of universities into various units competing within an internal market

coincided with a re-imagination of universities as also existing within a global market of higher

education. Over the past two decades universities have come to re-conceptualize themselves, and

their peers, as existing in increasingly competitive market relations, marked by intense competition

for student tuition revenue, government research grants, private philanthropy, corporate and private

funding, and lab-to-market revenue opportunities (Slaughter and Leslie, 1997). Within this

environment competitive ranking systems, such those established by the Times Higher Education

Supplement (THES) and Shanghai Jiao Tong University, gain important sway among administrators

and funders. These rankings prioritize the volume of publication, the research influence (defined

by number of citations), number of degrees awarded, awards received by faculty, student-teacher

ratios, institutional prestige (based on peer surveys), and the amount of income a school receives

from industry.9Based on these standards, universities around the world have engaged in strategic

efforts to realign their institutions to maximize their rankings on these, and other, competitive

9See: www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2011-2012/analysis-rankings-methodology.html. [accessed March 15,2012]


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ranking metrics. These standards place 84 North American universities in the top 200 (and seven in

the top ten), while only recognizing one African universityUniversity of Cape Town (103rd).10

The changing economic organization of higher education included a general shift from area

studies to global studies. The American Cold War university was heavily invested in area studies

(Wallerstein, 1997), owing to an interweaving of foundations, universities and state intelligence

agencies that formed to develop many centers and programs in area and comparative studies

(Cumings, 1998, 170). However, by the mid-1990s, funders began shifting resources from area

studies. For example, the Ford, Mellon, and MacArthur foundations, the American Council for

Learned Societies (ACLS), and other philanthropic institutions in the field of higher education began

shifting funding priorities from area studies to projects with a more global focus (West and Martin,

1997, Cumings, 1998, Mirsepassi et al., 2003). Scholars widely recognized that area studiesand

African studies in particularwere in crisis.11As scholars found traditional funding sources drying

up, many turned toward studying globalization. As those institutions that propelled the creation of

Area Studies programs and sustained them for almost two generations walked away, one need

only to examine universities current investment in the creation of new global programs and

centers (West and Martin, 1997, 318). Others found it difficult to tell whether structural changes

in the funding of area studies were driven by real world changes or by funders who are enamored

with sloppy notions of a global village and new programming opportunities (Watts, 1997).

10 For examples of various institutions adapting to these new managerial logics see: (Kamola andMeyerhoff, 2009, Barrow, 2010).11For example: in 1997 Africa Todayhad a special issue entitled The Future of Regional Studies(April/June 97; 44:2); World Politics(1996) published the proceedings of a symposium at PrincetonUniversity entitled The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics focusing on the turn towardinterdisciplinarity, postmodernism, and global research agendas within the field of ComparativePolitics; and, in 1995 Issue published a special issue on the crises facing African Studies(Winter/Spring; 23:1).


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While many universities in the U.S. were rapidly being transformed into sites for producing

knowledge about globalization, many African universities experienced considerable financial

austerity and remain on the margins of academic knowledge production.

Post-colonial African universities

In comparison to Western universities, many African universities have faced considerable

financial austerity in recent decades and remain relatively marginal sites of academic knowledge

production. This, however, has not always been the case. Prior to 1960 only six recognized colleges

existed in Sub-Saharan Africa. As African decolonization became inevitable during the 1960s, many

colonial powers began rapidly building universities in the hopes that they would train an educated,

and politically moderate, ruling elite. As a consequence university enrollments in Africa increased

nearly 11 percent every yearbetween the 1960 and 1980 and higher education accounted for nearly 20

percent of government spending (Hinchliffe, 1987, 1). One result of expanding educational

opportunities was the creation of an intellectual culture that challeng[ed] the imperial narrative

that had sought to obliterate the memory of their pre-colonial existence (Mkandawire, 2005, 1).

During the 1960s and 1970s a number of African universities emerged as important intellectual

centers serving as the vanguard of an emerging African intellectualism and campus[es] vibrated

with debates about fundamental issues of the daynationalism, socialism, democracy and the party

system (Mazrui, 2005, 58-59). African intellectuals trained abroad returned to take academic

positions in African universities and put their intellectual talents to work addressing the political

issues facing the newly independent African states. For example, Ngugi wa Thiongo returned from

Leeds University to take a position in the English Department at the University of Nairobi in 1967.

Ngugi and two colleaguesOwuor Anyumba and Taban lo Liyongcirculated a document calling

for replacing the English Department with a Department of African Literature and Languages


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claiming that, as it currently existed, the Department assumed the English tradition and the

emergence of the modern west is the central root of our consciousness and cultural heritage such

that Africa becomes an extension of the west (Ngugi et al., 1972, 146). This challenge, which

caused a flurry of activity at all levels of the university as well as in the press and even the

parliament, also traveled beyond Nairobi to other universities in Africa and beyond and became

one of the earliest shots in what later became postcolonial theory (Ngugi wa Thiong'o, 2012, 9).

During the same period, the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) became one of the

foremost universities on the continent, and achieved an international reputation (Shivji, 1996, 2).

The post-colonial intellectual project developed there grew from a dynamic intellectual community

of political scientists, historians, legal scholars, and sociologists from around the worldincluding

Isaa Shivji (Tanzania), Walter Rodney (Guyana), Mahmood Mamdani (Uganda), Lionel Cliffe

(United Kingdom), Giovanni Arrighi (Italy), Immanuel Wallerstein (United States), David Apter

(United States), John Saul (Canada), Terence Ranger (Britain), among others. Many of the key

theorists of world-system, dependency, and underdevelopment developed their work as part of the

vibrant intellectual debate taking place in UDSM (Shivji, 1996, 2). The post-colonial African

university provided a particular vantage point from which to produce academic knowledge about a

world shaped and divided by contradictory, and structurally antagonistic, social forces. In these

accounts, the world comprised of competing (and often irreconcilable) economic, social, political,

and cultural entities that could not be conceptualized as simply various instantiations of the same

global reality.

The anti- and post-colonial African university also embodied a different vision of higher

education, as many scholars developed close relationships between the university, policy, and the

non-academic world. For example, Walter Rodney found the scholarly apparatus in Great Britain

overly concerned with whom you footnote and therefore how, within a given field, a scholar


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tows the line and pay[s]...deference to each one of these authorities through your intellectual work

thereby ensuring that the material was only accessible to certain kinds of people (Rodney, 1990,

25-26). He contrasted that with Der es Salaalm where there was greater focus on developing an

African history and African studies in which academics did not have the last word (Rodney,

1990, 26). Finished while at UDSM, Rodneys How Europe Underdeveloped Africaoffers one example of

a vision of academic knowledge production that, in conception if not practice, sought to expand the

notion of who constitutes an intellectual, and who academic knowledge should exist for.

During the 1970s and 1980s, however, the international political economy of higher

education underwent a profound change. Many countries, and especially former colonies in Africa,

were devastated by high inflation that made the importation of educational materials prohibitively

expensive and priced many African countries out of access to books, journals, computers, and other

basic infrastructure (Caffentzis, 2000a, 4). The World Bank also emerged as a strong proponent of

defunding African higher education, arguing that a drastic reduction of higher education would

result in higher efficiency and a more egalitarian distribution of educational resources (Caffentzis,

2000a, 5). This assessment was based on the claim that higher education only yielded a 13 percent

return on investment, compared with a 26 percent return for primary education (Landell-Mills et al.,

1989, 77). During this period the IMF and World Bank strong-armed many indebted African

countries into reducing government subsidies for higher education and imposing user-fees. Many

private funders of African higher education followed suit and withdrew funding for universities,

choosing instead to invest in the primary and secondary education.

After two decades of austerity, many African universities had been significantly restructured

into institutions for economic development. In this context, the humanities and social sciences were

hit particularly hard since they were generally deemed market unfriendly and therefore largely

irrelevant (Olukoshi and Zeleza, 2004, 2). While the World Bank began reversing its position on


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higher education in the 1990s, it maintained its criticism of public spending on higher education and

instead encouraged foreign governments and donors to subsidize African universities. In 1991 the

World Bank released its Africa Capacity Building Initiative (ACBI) aimed at build[ing], over the

long term, a critical mass of professional African policy analysts and economic managers who will be

able to better manage the development process (Jaycox, 1991, 5). Critics observed that this new

policy allowed the World Bank and foreign donors to dismantle African national universities and

replace them with specialized regional institutes sponsored, financed, and managed to their

specification and replaced many African scholars who lacked the technocratic knowledge

necessary to be neoliberal economists and policy analysts (Caffentzis, 2000b, 70 & 72). By the late

1990s, the World Bank saw African higher education as the necessary link to help the continent

integrate into the global knowledge-based economy (World Bank, 2000, 9).

Many African universities still bear the marks of many decades of colonial rule and post-

colonial economic austerity, including persistent overcrowding, a continual lack access to basic

research materials, a routine inability to pay competitive faculty wages, the pressing requirement to

raise student tuition and cut living stipends, and, in some instances, political repression so severe as

to undermine any pretense of academic freedom.12 At University of Dakar, for example, the

overcrowding is so extreme that students often sleep six to a room in a campus of 60,000 students

designed to house 5,000 (Polgreen, 2007). The Balme Library at the University of Ghana, like many

university libraries in Africa, lacks contemporary research material and remains stocked mostly with

moribund, neocolonial scholarship of the 1950s and 1960s (Akurang-Parry, 2007, 46). Makerere

University, once one of Africas most prestigious academic institutions, was so severely

commercialized during the mid-1990s that many of its core academic disciplines turned to

12For an analysis of the many problems facing African higher education see: (Zeleza and Olukoshi,2004, Afolyan, 2007, Assi-Lumumba, 2006).


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cannibalizing each other in a ruthless drive to attract larger and larger pools of fee-paying students

(Mamdani, 2007).

In addition to the personal, political, cultural, and economic costs borne by such austerity,

there have also been profound intellectual costs. Many scholars in Africa now find themselves

disconnected from the centers of knowledge production and dependent upon international agencies

for funding. Much of the research conducted in African universities is often commissioned by

foreign institutions, agencies, or individuals who determine and control its content and gain

credit for it, a practice that creates serious hierarchies among African academics and materially

constrains the kind of intellectual work that can be produced (Federici, 2000, 19-21). This intellectual

recolonization (Federici, 2000, 19) follows a general pattern in which non-metropolitan thought

remains almost totally unreferenced within a globalization literature almost totally embedded in

metropolitan academic routines of citation and affiliation (Connell 2007: 379). In this context,

academic picture[s] of global society are often created by merely projecting traits already

recognized in metropolitan society (Connell 2007: 379). Because the largest and most productive

academic processing zones exist in the West, Africa and other non-Western locations often become

sites of unprocessed data and reservoirs of raw facts rather than sources of refined knowledge

(Comaroff and Comaroff, 2012, 1). This tendency results in a lack of epistemic diversity within the

globalization literature resulting in a monoculture of social scientific knowledge (Santos et al.,

2008).13

Theorizing the Social Whole beyond the Global

Today, the heated globalization debates of the 1990s and early 2000s have cooled quite a bit.

A growing number of scholars are voicing skepticism concerning globalization theorys lasting

13See also: (Cooper, 2005, Cooper, 2001, Ferguson, 2006)


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relevance, some declaring it by and large defunct (Leander, 2009, 110) and in need of a post

mortem (Rosenberg, 2005, see also: Rosenberg, 2000, Kamola, 2012). Some evidence even suggests

that the volume of academic work on globalization is declining, down from its high-water mark in

the late 1990s (Guilln, 2001, 241). However, as the globalization debate quiets, it becomes possible

to observe its lasting legacy. This legacy, I argue, lies less with particular conclusions about whether

globalization is new or old, good or bad, whether it undermines the nation-state, or differs

substantially from modernity or postmodernity. Rather, in the nearly two decades spent debating

these and other questions, scholars helped produce a consensus that the world is global through

their shared practices of positing some things (and not others) as global. Even as globalization

theory wanes, the particular global this literature produced continues to pervade the social

sciences, providing the foundation for numerous offshoot literatures currently shaping academic and

public debates, including on topics as far reaching as global governance, globalism, globality, global

development, global health, global capitalism, global civil society, anti- or alter-globalization, and

even the global war on terrorism.

At this conjuncture it also becomes possible to see how this short-lived intellectual eruption

can be situated as one iteration in a broader intellectual project aimed at finding ways to

conceptualize the world as a single social totality. Even as the globalization debate recedes, the

underlying intellectual question remains: how to conceptualize the systemness of the world

(Therborn, 2000, 155).14This question originally became a major concern for political scientists and

sociologists in the mid-1970s as scholars began rethinking the nation-state as their basic unit of

study. During this period, Wallerstein (1976) forcefully argued that the world could best be

understood as a single economic system. A number of Wallersteins contemporaries criticized the

economic determinism of his argument and proposed instead world culture and world polity as the

14 For an overview of the changing concept of the world in sociological debates leading up to, and including, theemergence of an academic literature on globalization, see: (Turner, 1994, Chapter 8)


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organizing forces within an increasingly world system (Meyer, 1980, Meyer et al., 1997, Boli and

Thomas, 1997).15 During the same period scholars in the English School tackled questions

concerning the constitution of world society (Buzan, 2004, Chapter 1). These competing notions of

what constitutes a world system were direct interventions into dominant realist accounts of the

international systemunderstood as a sovereign void inhabited by nation-states. Globalization later

emerged as another way to problematize the international.

Today, given the increasingly apparent limitations of globalization theory, a number of

scholars are advocating for a return to these more sociologically sophisticated inquiries into the

world system. Barry Buzan, for example, writes that returning to the theoretically richer accounts of

world society makes sense for those concerned with the analytical vacuousness of globalization

(Buzan, 2004, 3). Similarly, Mathias Albert argues that globalization can avoid becoming yesterdays

intellectual fad by returning to Niklas Luhmanns more robust sociological theory, thereby making

it possible to see a global social wholerather than a national unitas its point of reference

(Albert, 2007, 180). Whatever the strengths (Thomas, 2009, Jaeger, 2009) or limitations (Leander,

2009, Bartelson, 2009, Hindess, 2009) of such a move, Albert and others are correct in expressing a

desire to develop more systemic ways of thinking the global social whole. Returning to more

rigorous world systemic thinking might go a long way towards addressing the limitations of

globalization theory, including its reliance on seemingly arbitrary assumptions about what does, and

does not, count as global.

Developing more systemic and sociological theorizing of the world system, however, should

not ignore the highly asymmetrical political economy of higher education in which such knowledge

is produced. Rather, scholars would be well served theorizing the university, and the production of

academic knowledge more generally, as itself part of how the world is structured and restructured.

15For an overview of the Stanford School, see: (Buhari-Gulmez, 2010).


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Such a move, however, requires more than asserting that the expansion of higher education is

indicative of an emerging world polity (Schofer and Meyer, 2005; Meyer and Schofer). Rather, it

become necessary to theorize exactly how a changing political economy of higher education informs

how knowledge about the world is produced and reproduced, by whom, and for what purpose.

Doing so requires actively engaging the great wealth of knowledges found across various worlds of

higher education, including within African universities.

Conclusion

Studying higher education as a site of world-making is particularly timely given the rampant

neoliberalization of higher education and the effects these changes are having on what knowledge is

produced, and by whom. What is (and is not) global is continually shaped by the structural

relations in which knowledge is produced, including the universities we inhabit, the professional

conferences we attend and the publishing regimes under which we work. This means that different

conceptions of the worldones that more explicitly trace the profound and irreconcilable

contradictions constituting social realityalso require remaking the apparatuses of knowledge

production themselves. Doing so involves not only reading, citing and publishing the work of

scholars currently left on the margins of academic knowledge production, but also creating the

material infrastructures through which the production of alternative knowledges is possible. As such,

simply thinking and theorizing the world differently remains insufficient. Rather, scholars must make

the world differently from within the political, economic, social, cultural, and material institutions in

which we live and work. This project requires remaking the political economy of higher education in

ways that enable the world to be defined by a greatly extended we. Rethinking the world from

within a political economy of higher education, therefore, assumes a structuralism that is also a

radically immanent materialism. After all, the social whole is always already lived as structure, even


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by those academics struggling to know it better from within the limitations of the various

institutions in which we work and live.

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