Globalization: An Ascendant Paradigm?

Abstract

International Studies is on the cusp of a debate between para‐keepers, observers who are steadfast about maintaining the prevailing paradigms and deny that globalization offers a fresh way of thinking about the world, and para‐makers, who bring into question what they regard as outmoded categories and claim to have shifted to an innovatory paradigm. This distinction is a heuristic that allows for various gradations and dynamic interactions between the keepers and the makers. It helps to identify anomalies in and discomfort with International Studies. Partly as a response to these problems, globalization studies has evolved and may be tentatively delimited by a distinct set of characteristics. But, in the near term, there is no looming Kuhnian crisis in the sense of an impending overthrow that would quickly sweep away reigning paradigms. Given that systematic research on globalization is only slightly more than a decade in the making, it is most likely that International Studies has entered an interregnum between the old and the new. At this time, as a paradigm, globalization is more of a potential than a worked‐out framework. It may be best understood as a proto‐paradigm.