International Political Sociology (2013) 7, 4158

Why Global? Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within a Political Economy of Higher Education1
Isaac Kamola Johns Hopkins University
This article examines the assumed factuality of globalization in light of its persistent conceptual incoherence. Through a diagnosis of ve reoccurring ambiguities within the globalization literature, I argue that the concept of globalization lacks an empirical referent. Scholars writing on globalization overcome this absence by asserting that some things (the Internet, McDonalds, etc.) and not others (genocide in Rwanda, refugee camps, etc.) are essentially global. It turns out, however, that who is positioned to posit some things (and not others) as global, and therefore posit the foundation for a theory of globalization, is shaped by a highly asymmetrical political economy of knowledge production. In particular, some scholarsusually in North American and European universitiesare materially better positioned to produce knowledge about globalization than many of their colleagues in postcolonial countries. The seemingly arbitrary positing of some things as global, therefore, should be understood as a symptom of the highly unequal social relations in which knowledge about globalization is produced.

Today, friends and foes of globalization debate its effects. Both assume the reality of such a process, which can either be praised or lamented, encouraged or combated. Are we asking the best questions about issues of contemporary importance when we debate globalization? (Cooper 2005:92)

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 (Hay and Marsh 2000:1; Steger 2003:12) and a concept that penetrate[s] the discourse of all social science disciplines (Hoogvelt 2001:121). However, while globalization has become a near-universal term (Robertson and Khondker 1998:26), it remains fraught with profound ambiguity and conceptual confusion. A chorus of scholars have recognized that there is no accepted denition of globalization (Robertson and White 2007:54), that the term has come to mean many things to many people (Babones 2007:144), and it
1 I would like to thank Wesleyan Universitys Center for the Humanities and the Political Science department at Johns Hopkins University for housing me as a postdoctoral fellow while I nished this article. I am also thankful for the many people who provided important feedback during the writing process, including Manfred Steger, Niels van Doorn, Jennifer Erickson, Serena Laws, Daniel Levine, Amentahru Wahlrab, Bud Duvall, Lisa Disch, Premesh lo lyan, Lalu, Michael Barnett, Antonio Vazquez-Arroyo, Jill Morawski, Joseph Fitzpatrick, Nima Bassiri, Khachig To and two anonymous reviewers at IPS. This project was completed with generous support from the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) New Faculty Fellows program.

Kamola, Isaac. (2013) Why Global? Diagnosing the Globalization Literature Within a Political Economy of Higher Education. International Political Sociology, doi: 10.1111/ips.12008 2013 International Studies Association

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Why Global?

includes anything from the Internet to a hamburger (Strange 1996:xii-xiii). Most articles and books on globalization begin by lamenting the concepts ambiguity (Bartelson 2000:181). However, the failure to pinpoint what globalization is has not challenged the quite solid agreement that globalization is (Bartelson 2000:180). While conceptual ambiguity may not itself be inherently problematic, this persistent slippage in the globalization literature actually 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 rst requires [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 globalization literature does not stem simply from a scholarly inability to accurately document the realyet-complex phenomenon called globalization. Nor does this confusion stem from rigid adherence to disciplinary frameworks that obscure a phenomenon better understood from a position of interdisciplinarity (for example, Steger 2003:14). Rather, this ambiguity is rooted in the fact that academic writing on globalization requires rst amassing a series of supposedly heterogeneous phenomena and then declaring these things (and not others) to be part of an already existing global world. In other words, while globalization is presented as complex, contradictory, uid, changing, contextual, ideological, and discursive, most authors never actually examine their fundamental assertion that the world is already and essentially global. This unquestioned claim that the world is global becomes the necessary foundation upon which the concept of globalization coheres. Diagnosing the seemingly arbitrary way in which academics decide what does and does not count as global is important because doing so makes visible the deeply asymmetrical relations of knowledge production existing within the political economy of higher education. These inequalities create the material conditions under which some scholars are better positioned to assert what does (and does not) count as global. This article argues, rst, that in order to understand the persistent and intractable ambiguity embedded within the concept of globalization, scholars should diagnose2 the literatures a priori assumption that the world is global. I diagnose ve specic ways in which the worldwhich could otherwise be thought of as contradictory, antagonistic, plural, particular, and 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 the seemingly arbitrary claim that some things are essentially global is actually 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 difcult for scholars to compete within an increasingly marketized eld of knowledge production.3 I conclude by examining how the
2 My diagnosis of the globalization literature aims to uncover those moments in a text where an absence becomes present. In the case of the globalization literature, globalizations conceptual dependency upon the assertion of the global becomes evident in a number of nervous ticks, stammers, hesitations, notes of self-doubt, and awkward vacillations. These moments can by diagnosed as symptoms of the overdetermined social relations within which a text is produced. Therefore, rather than examining how globalization is represented, conceptualized, modeled, measured, or even understood, diagnosing the globalization literature identies those moments where the declared relationship between the object of study and its referent breaks down (see also fn. 4). 3 My focus on African universities in this article stems both from personal research interests and 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 about globalization is produced differently within other marginalized sites of knowledge production, including universities in Central Asia, South Asia, Latin America, branch campuses in the Middle East, or even American community and technical colleges.

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unquestioned claim that the world is global continues to shape academic approaches to studying the world, even after academic debates about globalization 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. By situating academic efforts to conceptualize the social whole within a political economy of higher education, it becomes possible to ask: What do we mean when we say global? Who is this we? And, how can a different and extended we produce the global differently? 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. Rather, the absence of a coherent understanding should be read as symptomatic4 of the literatures largely unspoken dependency upon an assumed global to underwrite globalizations appearance of conceptual coherence. Re-reading the literature with an eye toward 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 Unspecied Adjective Global

Globalization often faces a conceptual crisis at the moment it requires a denition. One common technique for dening globalization involves invoking an otherwise unspecied adjective global. For example, scholars dene globalization in terms of a growing magnitude or intensity of global ows (Held and McGrew 2003:3), as including social effects on a global scale (Busch 2007:23), as involving ows of commodities, capital, technology, ideas, forms of culture, and people via a global networked society (Kellner 2002:287), as associated with an evolving dynamic global structure (Held, McGrew, Goldblatt and Perraton 1999), as the process by which societies were brought together into one global system (Modelski 2000:49), and as rather simply the intensication of global interconnectedness (Inda and Rosaldo 2008:7). While there is nothing inherently problematic in dening globalization in terms of global ows, scales, networks, structures, systems, or interconnectedness, the problem arises when the adjective global remains unexamined, undened, and even taken for granted. Most authors grounding their denition of globalization on this adjective assume that what makes an object global is self-evident. For example, Robins states that globalization can be identied 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
4 I draw this method of symptomatic reading from Althusser who argues that empiricist conceptions of knowledge assume that knowledge, like gold, is found only when the outside dirt is removed and the essence of a thing is made visible. Most academic knowledge about globalization, in other words, claims the scholars simply discover that the world is already essentially global. However, what empiricist conceptions of globalization assume to be discovering is actually being produced at the level of the texts unconscious. Because the production of knowledge takes place within particular structured material relations (such as universities), knowledge necessarily contains various tensions that are effects of the contradictory relations in which it is produced (Althusser and Balibar 1999; see also Kamola 2012).

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Why Global?

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 dictatorshipswhich 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 and money transfers, modern transportation and communication, and your Blackberry and iPod have all contributed [to] globalization while it took hundreds of years for the effects of Columbuss discovery of America to be fully felt, it has taken only thirty years for Chinas great economic boom to have a global impact on trade and nancial markets, to say nothing of the global balance of power. (2007:3)

The slippage takes place when a list of seemingly equivalent objects (that is, consumer electronics and communication technologies) lead 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 analytically equivalent to 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 seemingly arbitrary chain of equivalencies? Producing the global through a list is also commonly found in efforts to quantitatively measure levels of globalization by identifying various indices. For example, the 2010 KOF Index of Globalization5 ranks countries in terms of their levels of globalization, with Belgium and Austria ranking rst and second. Interestingly, the Cayman Islands ranks 187 out of 208, despite housing a signicant portion of the worlds offshore bank 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 multinational military interventions. What makes trade, foreign direct investment, portfolio investment, telephone trafc, tourism, Internet usage, and the per capita number of McDondalds and Ikea stores KOF indicators of globalization but not, for example, the number of offshore accounts or foreign troops per capita? Not only are the global qualities of these objects simply asserted, but a different ad hoc listsuch as one asserting that offshore banking accounts, foreign occupation, illegal drug exports, and levels of foreign debt count as globalwould yield a fundamentally different picture of globalization.

5 This annual measure of globalization published by ETH University, Zurich, Switzerland, can be found at: http://globalization.kof.ethz.ch. Other quantications of globalization, with similar lists of global measures, can be found at A.T. Kearney, Inc 2001, 2007; Heshmati 2006; Vujakovic 2009.

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Diagnosis Three: The Global as Not Local

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The global is also often produced through rst asserting that a particular place or thing is local. For example, while great ethnographic and historical attention is paid to the specicity of maas in Mumbai (Weinstein 2008), conicts over mining in Peru (Haarstad and Flysand 2007), or conservation policies in Thailand (Buergin 2003), globalization becomes everything not directly present in the location of ones case. For example, the World Bank, IMF, multinational corporations, overseas politicians, and nanciers become global merely by being not local [to my case study]. Creating the narrow and tangible connes of the local effectively produces the global as everything else. Producing the global as not local takes place even in those works most dedicated to undoing the local/global dichotomy. For example, Tsings 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 redening global forces as congeries of local/ global interaction, and, therefore, an ethnography of globalization becomes possible at points of friction, dened as the 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 globalization claims that the spatial dimension of the local makes it possible to capture the necessarily spatial distribution of that which is being globalized (Robertson and White 2003:15). The pervasive local/global dichotomy indicates the degree to which scholars of globalization need to rst assert a clear and stable local as the prism through which the globaland therefore globalizationcomes into focus. However, what counts as local and not local is little more than a seemingly arbitrary by-product of how one chooses to dene the contours of ones 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. These moments of self-doubt, however, 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 (2003:15). In many instances, the invocation of a large population of people also describing the world as global becomes a way to sidestep 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 100 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 ner scalemore discrete issuesthe structures become discernible and, as a consequence, he found that his informants were actually discussing globalization even if not using the term (Mittelman 2000:1213). This is not 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

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Why Global?

term globalization might be prevalent among certain sectors of the worlds population, including American academics, this does not necessarily mean that everyone sees the world as global. Conating widespread 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 an 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 an increasing number of politicians, business people, journalists, scholars and citizens view and make sense of a changing world. Sweatshop workers in Central America, human rights activists in East Timor, entrepreneurs in transition economies, Inuit threatened by global warming in their Arctic homelands, HIV-infected people in Southern Africa, not to mention stockbrokers in London or Tokyo, sense that their fortunes partly depend on events occurring in distant parts of the globe. The notion of globalization provides a shared vocabulary to express this sense of connectednessalthough those affected might well have very different views about the word and what it conveys Employers and trade unionists, environmentalists and polluters, indigenous peoples and multinational corporations, feminists and male chauvinists, fundamentalists and liberals, free traders and protectionists, human rights activists and authoritarian rulers, nationalists and multilateralists, the North and the South: all these groups have found that the capacity to achieve their goals is affected, in one way or another, by the forces of globalization. Consequently many of them seek to make sense of this phenomenon (Koenig-Archibugi 2003:2)

At rst 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 conates 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. There is a 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, reafrmed 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 contentthat is, the existence of a shared assumption that people at distant parts of the globe are connectedis simply posited by the author. After all, Koenig-Archibugi

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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 conation is not merely sloppy but symptomatic of the impossibility of using one word to capture the existing thing (that is, forces/ phenomena) of globalization and the lens/concept of globalization through which this thing is dened. 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 already and unmistakably global then makes it possible to force coherence upon what is otherwise incoherent. In other words, the assumption that the world is global 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 demarcations 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 fullling? Who arbitrarily denes 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 nancial 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 Bras lia, or coltan mining in eastern Congo. If knowledge about globalization is predicated on the seemingly arbitrary claim that some things are global, one could imagine what would happen if other people were materially positioned to produce knowledge about globalization. A globalization literature written (or performed, sung, or narrated) by refugees, pirates, slum dwellers, or coltan miners would be quite different than the one produced within the world of higher education. Similarly, one could also imagine an academic literature on globalization 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 those objects 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 of 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.

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Why Global?

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; see also Salmi 2009). That being said, this dominant vision of universities as corporate entities operating within an international, and highly competitive, education market is not the only form of academic knowledge production. One historicaland often neglectedexample of how academic knowledge can be produced differently is the anti- and postcolonial 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 postcolonial 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 and 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 re-branding 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 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 rst developed in American business schools during the 1980s. Theodore Levitts groundbreaking 1983 article The Globalization of Markets, published in the Harvard Business Review, argued that while the multinational corporation adjusts its products and practices depending on the country, the newly coined global corporation operates 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 1983:9293). 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

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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 nancial language imported from the private sector (Neweld 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 (Neweld 2008:164). Greater private investment brought changing managerial and administrative styles to many universities, including the embracing 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 (ofce space, library privileges, phones, etc.) and revenue (credit hours, grant money, etc.). These various units were governed by a system of competitive nancial incentives, which included opening departmental nancial records to outside scrutiny and requiring programs to defend their existence in market terms (Neweld 2008:165172). The transformation of universities into various units competing within an internal market coincided with a re-imagination of universities themselves 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 laboratory-to-market revenue opportunities (Slaughter and Leslie 1997; Kamola and Meyerhoff 2009). Within this environment, competitive ranking systems, such as 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 inuence (dened by number of citations), number of degrees awarded, awards received by faculty, studentteacher ratios, institutional prestige (based on peer surveys), and the amount of income a school receives from industry.6 Based 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 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). The changing economic organization of higher education encouraged a tidal shift in the production of academic knowledge, including 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 funders of higher education began shifting priorities from area studies to projects with a more global focus (West and Martin 1997; Cumings 1998; Mirsepassi, Basu and
6 See: www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/20112012/analysis-rankings-methodology.html. (Accessed March 15, 2012.)

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Weaver 2003). Scholars widely recognized that area studiesand African studies in particularwere in crisis.7 As 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 difcult 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). While many universities in the United States were rapidly being transformed into sites for producing knowledge about globalization, many African universities experienced considerable nancial austerity that placed them on the margins of academic knowledge production.
Postcolonial African Universities

In comparison with Western universities, many African universities have faced even more severe nancial austerity in recent decades. While only six recognized colleges existed in Sub-Saharan Africa prior to 1960, African decolonization pushed many colonial powers to rapidly build 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% every year between 1960 and 1980, and higher education accounted for nearly 20% 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 2005:5859). 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 the replacement of the English Department with a Department of African Literature and Languages 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, Owuor-Anyumba and Lo Liyong 1972:146). This challenge, which caused a urry 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 2012). During the same period, many graduate students and young faculty from Europe and North America were formidably shaped by their experiences studying and working in postcolonial African universities.
7 For example: in 1997, Africa Today had a special issue entitled The Future of Regional Studies (April/June 97, 44:2); World Politics (1996) published the proceedings of a symposium at Princeton University entitled The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics focusing on the turn toward interdisciplinarity, postmodernism, and global research agendas within the eld of Comparative Politics; and, in 1995 Issue published a special issue on the crises facing African Studies (Winter/Spring, 23:1).

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One of the most notable examples is the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) that became one of the foremost universities on the continent and achieved an international reputation (Shivji 1996:2). The postcolonial 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), and Terence Ranger (Britain), among others. Many of the early theorists of world system, dependency, and underdevelopment developed their work as part of the vibrant intellectual debates taking place at UDSM (Shivji 1996:2). The postcolonial 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 postcolonial African university also embodied a different vision of higher education, one in which scholars moved freely between the university, radical political movements, and policy circles. As a consequence, academic knowledge was not considered a socially and politically abstracted project but rather as one tool for social transformation within a contested political world. For example, Walter Rodney found the scholarly apparatus in Great Britain was overly concerned with whom you footnote and therefore how, within a given eld, a scholar toes 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 1990:2526). 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 (1982) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa offers 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. Many postcolonial African universities, as well as contemporaries in Latin America and elsewhere, created the institutional, political, and social conditions in which scholars from around the world collaborated in the production of knowledge about world systems, development, world order, and other topics, many of which would later became subsumed within the academic discourse of globalization. These intellectual circles and debates included intensive intellectual exchanges between Western and non-Western scholars and institutions and created the potential for producing knowledge about the world as a contradictory, heterogeneous, and contested whole. 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 ination 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 de-funding African higher education, arguing that a drastic reduction of higher education would result in higher efciency and a more egalitarian distribution of educational resources (Caffentzis 2000b:5). This assessment was based on the claim that higher education only yielded a 13% return on investment, compared with a 26% return for primary education (Landell-Mills, Agarwala and Please 1989:77). During this period, the IMF and World Bank strong-armed many indebted African countries into reducing

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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 signicantly restructured into institutions for economic development. In this context, the humanities and social sciences have been 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 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, nanced, and managed to their specication. Many African scholars who lacked the technocratic knowledge necessary to be neoliberal economists and policy analysts were likewise replaced (Caffentzis 2000a: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 knowledgebased economy (World Bank 2000:9). Many African universities still bear the marks of many decades of colonial rule and postcolonial economic austerity, including persistent overcrowding, a continual lack of 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 (Zeleza and Olukoshi 2004; Assi e-Lumumba 2006; Afol ayan 2007). At the 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 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 nd themselves disconnected from the centers of knowledge production and dependent upon international agencies for funding. Much of the research conducted in African universities is 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 2000:1921). 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 afliation (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 rened

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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 scientic knowledge (Santos, Arriscado Nunes and Paula Meneses 2008; see also Cooper 2005, 2010; Ferguson 2006). Theorizing the Social Whole beyond the Global Today, the heated globalization debates of the 1990s and early 2000s have quieted to a murmur. A growing number of scholars even voice skepticism about whether globalization theory has any lasting relevance, some declaring it by and large defunct (Leander 2009:110) and in need of a postmortem (Rosenberg 2000; see also Rosenberg 2005; Kamola 2012). Some evidence even suggests that the volume of academic work on globalization is declining, down from its highwater mark in the late 1990s (Guill en 2001:241). However, as the globalization debate quiets, it becomes possible to observe its lasting legacy. This legacy 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 repeatedly made assertions about what does (and does not) count as global. Even as globalization theory wanes, the 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 intellectual eruption during the 1990s and 2000s was actually just one iteration in the broader intellectual project of developing 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). The aim of diagnosing the contradictions and tensions within the globalization literature, therefore, is not to discourage scholars from seeking better understandings of how the world is structured, but rather to emphasize that even academic accounts of social structure are themselves always already structured by a political economy of higher education. As such, social scientists interested in theorizing the world as a system should remember that prior to the rise of the globalization literature, and the social conditions for its emergence, there existed a whole ecosystem of concepts and terms for understanding the systemness of the world. In addition to those contributed by African academics (for example, Amin 1976; Rodney 1982), Wallerstein (1976)shaped by his time at the University of Dar es Salaamforcefully argued that the world is best understood as a single economic system. Others proposed instead world culture and world polity as the organizing forces within an increasingly world system (Boli and Thomas 1997; Meyer 1980; Meyer, Boli, Thomas and Ramirez 1997; see also: Buhari-Gulmez 2010). In subsequent years, many of these intellectual approaches were displaced by a vast globalization literature, the success of which had little to do with globalization being a more intellectually rigorous or empirically accurate way of understanding the world. Today, given the increasingly apparent limitations of globalization theory, a number of scholars are abandoning the concept in favor of 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 more robust sociological theories,

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thereby making it possible to see a global social wholerather than a national unitas its point of reference (Albert 2007:180). Whatever the strengths (Jaeger 2009; Thomas 2009) or limitations (Bartelson 2009; Hindess 2009; Leander 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, systemic thinking might go a long way toward 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, cannot ignore the highly asymmetrical political economy of higher education in which such knowledge is produced. Rather, scholars would be well suited by theorizing the university, and the production of academic knowledge more generally, as itself a vital component in the structuring of the world. Such a move, however, requires more than describing the rapid expansion of higher education as indicative of an emerging world polity (see also: Meyer and Schofer 2009; Schofer and Meyer 2005:918). Rather, it becomes 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 entails actively engaging the great wealth of knowledges found across the worlds of higher education, including within African universities. Conclusion A turn toward the study of higher education as part of the world-making project 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) considered 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 that constitute social realityalso require the work of remaking the very apparatuses of knowledge production. 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 that make the production of alternative academic knowledge possible. As such, simply thinking and theorizing the world differently is insufcient. Rather, scholars must examine and confront the political, economic, social, cultural, and material institutions in which we live and work. This project requires working to remake the political economy of higher education in ways that enable the world to be dened by a greatly extended we. Engaging the 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 by those struggling to know it better from within the limitations (and possibilities) of the various academic institutions in which we live and work. References
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