1 - Introduction

Summary

As the world appears to waver between globalist expansion and nationalist retrenchment, it is hardly surprising that two questions related to the perceived ‘globalization backlash’ have taken centre stage in relevant popular and academic discourses. What is happening to globalization? Does it still matter in our unsettled times? These fundamental questions traverse the chapters of this book and are the subject of this introduction. Our answer is affirmative: globalization still matters a lot—though not in the same ways it did 25 years or even a decade ago. The main task of this chapter is to introduce how the significance of globalization has been reconfigured over the period we call the 'Great Unsettling’. We begin our engagement with the global in these strange times by narrating the recent unfolding story of globalization: why and how it rose to superstardom only to fall into infamy in the short span of three decades.