Global politics

Global politics, also known as world politics,^[1] names both the discipline that studies the political and economic patterns of the world and the field that is being studied. At the centre of that field are the different processes of political globalization in relation to questions of social power.

The discipline studies the relationships between cities, nation-states, shell-states, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations and international organizations.^[2] Current areas of discussion include national and ethnic conflict regulation, democracy and the politics of national self-determination, globalization and its relationship to democracy, conflict and peace studies, comparative politics, political economy, and the international political economy of the environment. One important area of global politics is contestation in the global political sphere over legitimacy.^[3]

Global politics is said by some to be distinct from the field of international politics (commonly seen as a branch of international relations^[1]), as it "does not stress the primacy of intergovernmental relations and transactions".^[4] This distinction however has not always been held among authors and political scientists, who often use the term "international politics" to mean global politics.^[1]

It has been suggested that global politics may be best understood as an "imaginary" of a political space existing beyond the sub-national, national, and international.^[5][6] This imaginary structures global politics as both a field of study and a set of practices, and though it only rose to prominence in the late twentieth century, has longer historical roots stretching back at least to the creation of medieval mappa mundi^[7] and to first contact between Afro-Eurasia and the Americas through colonialism and the Age of Sail.^[8]