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In light of recent global trends and crises, including the hasty withdrawal of Western troops from Afghanistan and the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, this book sheds new light on global power shifts in multiple areas of international relations between industrialized countries and emerging powers.
This book argues that "the global age" is rapidly supplanting "the modern age", and that modernity is paving the way for globality. The events that are taking place in the 21st century can no longer be effectively described, understood or explained by the concept of modernity which originated more than 500 years ago.
Further, this book challenges the academic and societal tendency to view international power-related phenomena on the basis of a dichotomy between hard and soft power. It assumes that another power source, independent of hard and soft power, does exist. Invisible, structure-manipulating, and effectively leveraged, it is precisely this "third power" that drives and shapes power phenomena in the "global age" more intensively than either hard or soft power.
This book seeks to verify its core hypotheses by applying them to a set of selected global phenomena, particularly from the domains of geopolitics (Belt & Road Initiative, Iran conflict, war in Afghanistan, and competition for a new world order) and technology (Global Navigation Satellite Systems, 5G infrastructure, race for international standards, and ICT rivalry). Rather than systematically examining each of these issues, it focuses on extracting theoretical meanings from these cases to demonstrate the logic of globality and structural power, partly from global-horizontal perspectives, partly through a structural-vertical lens.
List of contents
Part I. Global-Horizontal Perspectives.- Chapter 1. Globality: A New Paradigm of Thought.- Chapter 2. The Nature of Globality and Its Logic.- Chapter 3. Measurability of Globality and World Order.- Chapter 4. Compatibility of Globality and Global Navigation Satellite Systems.- Chapter 5. The Poverty of Eurocentrism in Light of Globality.- Chapter 6. Can American Exceptionalism Survive the Global Age?.- Chapter 7. How Vulnerable is Globality?.- Part II. Structural-Vertical Insights.- Chapter 8. Globality and Structural Power.- Chapter 9. The Search for Structural Power.- Chapter 10. The Nature of Structural Power.- Chapter 11. Dispositional Power and 5G Standards.- Chapter 12.Understanding the Meanings of Context of Power.- Chapter 13. The Illusion of "The Clean Network".- Chapter 14.Open RAN: An Adventurous Antithesis to Globality of 5G.- Chapter 15. Epilogue: America, China, and the Future of the World.
About the author
Prof. Dr. Xuewu Gu is Chair of International Relations and Director of the Center for Global Studies at the University of Bonn (Germany) since 2009. From 2002 to 2009, he served as Chair of East Asian Politics and Director of the Institute of East Asian Politics at the University of Bochum.
