Respatialization of the World - Actors, Moments, Effects

14th International Summer School of the Graduate School Global and Area Studies (Leipzig U)

Overview

The world is undergoing processes of respatialization – existing spatial frameworks for social actions are being undermined while others are emerging and competing with ones already established. Neither the nation-state nor global governance nor new regionalisms definitely form the endpoint of such processes. Likewise, transnational or global networks and chains, which have received more and more scholarly attention, have also failed to completely exert dominance as could be seen most recently during the financial crisis in 2008 when nation-states, and their alliances, became important again for rescuing economies and welfare systems. Current public debates about the crisis of Europe have led to the question if supranational structures and multilevel governance will be accepted as alternatives to the nation-state. As with all observations of the contemporary world, this leads to the question if such doubts in the one or the other spatial formats are really new or if we can identify similar crisis of spatial orders in former historical configurations.