Global politics

Global politics, also known as world politics, names both the discipline that studies the political and economical 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. 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.

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

Defining the field

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, several groups extended the definition of the political community beyond nation-states to include much, if not all, of humanity. These "internationalists" include Marxists, human rights advocates, environmentalists, peace activists, feminists, and dalits. This was the general direction of thinking on global politics, though the term was not used as such.

The modern "world politics perspective" is often identified with the works of Joseph Nye and Robert Keohane, in particular their 1972 work Transnational Relations and World Politics. Here, the authors argued that state-centric views of international relations were inadequate frameworks to utilize in political science or international relations studies due to the increased globalization.  Today, the practices of global politics are defined by values: norms of human rights, ideas of human development, and beliefs such as Internationalism or cosmopolitanism about how we should relate to each. Over the last couple of decades cosmopolitanism has become one of the key contested ideologies of global politics:

“	Cosmopolitanism can be defined as a global politics that, firstly, projects a sociality of common political engagement among all human beings across the globe, and, secondly, suggests that this sociality should be either ethically or organizationally privileged over other forms of sociality.