GV4N6      Half Unit
The Politics of Globalization

This information is for the 2025/26 session.

Course Convenor

Availability

The course examines the nature, the causes and the political consequences of globalization in a variety of domains, including security, culture, the economy, and the environment. The course aims at enabling students to assess the extent of continuity and transformation in key areas of global politics.

The course will analyse how globalization shapes, and in turn is shaped by, politics within countries, between countries and beyond countries. It will introduce the main approaches to the study of globalization and examine how it affects patterns of conflict, cooperation and competition between a range of politically relevant actors, including governments, political parties and citizens, great powers, intergovernmental and nongovernmental organisations, global companies and other non-state groups. The course will also assess the challenges to and opportunities for democracy in a global age.

16.5 hours of lectures and 15 hours of seminars in the Autumn Term.
1.5 hours of lectures in the Spring Term.

This course has a reading week in Week 6 of Autumn Term.

Presentation

Essay

Students will be expected to produce 1 essay and 1 presentation in the AT.

• Held, David, Anthony McGrew, David Goldblatt and Jonathan Perraton (1999), Global Transformations, Cambridge: Polity Press.
• Zürn, Michael, and Pieter de Wilde. "Debating globalization: cosmopolitanism and communitarianism as political ideologies." Journal of political ideologies 21, no. 3 (2016): 280-301.
• Acharya, Amitav. "After liberal hegemony: The advent of a multiplex world order." Ethics & international affairs 31, no. 3 (2017): 271-285.
• Milanovic, Branko. "The great convergence: Global equality and its discontents." Foreign Affairs, 102 (2023).
• Paxton, Pamela, Melanie M. Hughes, and Jennifer L. Green. "The international women's movement and women's political representation, 1893–2003." American Sociological Review 71, no. 6 (2006): 898-920.
• Xuetong, Yan. "Bipolar rivalry in the early digital age." The Chinese Journal of International Politics 13, no. 3 (2020): 313-341.
• Börzel, Tanja A., and Michael Zürn. "Contestations of the liberal international order: From liberal multilateralism to postnational liberalism." International Organization 75, no. 2 (2021): 282-305.
• Lim, Adelyn (2016), “Transnational Organizing and Feminist Politics of Difference and Solidarity: The Mobilization of Domestic Workers in Hong Kong” Asian Studies Review, 40 (1): 70-88.

Exam (100%), duration: 180 Minutes in the Spring exam period