The Politics of Global Connectivities

The Politics of Global Connectivities is a thematic priority of HTIR. It aims at thinking connectivity as a relational effect across political, economic, social, cultural, and religious domains. Such interaction materializes into spaces of governance such as political institutions, physical infrastructures, knowledge regimes, populations, markets and visual imaginaries. It contributes to the creation of geopolitical imaginaries of order, power, and governance.

Through practices of ‘ wondering ’ about the constitution of orders of governance, a key concern of this theme is to detail, analyse and theorize historical and contemporary forms of connectivity. The objective is to bring to the fore the relational character of global politics and critically appraise categories of thought such as the 'global', the 'national', and the 'international' and interrogate concepts such as ‘geopolitics’.

For an example of research done on this area at HTIR, please see the website on our book trilogy on The Creation of (Western) Global Spaces.

Other projects in this area explore the politics of thinking space, place and site through, for example, the analysis of satellite imagery as productive of geopolitical imaginations; the (historical) politics of global seaport connectivities and the use of metaphors for thinking relationality, the constitution of circuits of culture, power and trade in the early modern period, imaginative geographies (e.g. of the west and the rest), and theoretical reflections on connectivity as a category of thought.