Welcome to Volume 7 Number 1 of the Journal of International and Global Studies. We continue to increase our subscriptions to this free open access online interdisciplinary journal. If you would like to subscribe to the journal, just click on the tab at the top of the page below the journal title. We will be sure to send you the web link to the journal so that you can read and download the essays in accordance with your interests. You will also provide us with a database so that we can draw on your expertise for peer reviewing essays for the journal.

This Fall 2015 issue features five essays from a variety of different disciplines, 28 book reviews and one film review on globalization topics (defined broadly), a predominant theme of the journal. The lead essay by Laurie Occhipinti discusses faith-based organizations (FBOs) in Argentina as they responded to the practices of neoliberalism by extending their social services to poor communities. As the Argentinian state failed to deliver services to poor communities as a result the austerity programs demanded by neoliberal policies, Occhipinti demonstrates with two case studies based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the late 1990s how the FBOs supported by the legitimacy of the Catholic Church managed to resist state policies. These FBOs competed with the neoliberal state by offering an alternative vision of what Occhipinti refers to as a ‘pluricultural’ society based on reciprocity and communal labor. The authority of the Catholic Church and these FBOs provided a role in civil society that enabled the redistribution of resources to these poor communities. Although one of the private non-profit organizations, Fundapaz, founded by a group of nuns is not officially part of the Catholic Church, its roots are within the progressive wing of the Church’s concern with poverty and social justice. The other non-profit NGO for study is OCLADE, which was established by the Catholic Church. Although the Catholic Church tends to be conservative in Argentina, Occhipinti found that both Fundapaz and OCLADE reflected the values and practices of the liberation theology movement that emerged in the 1970s. Following the 1990s, as a result of the influence and discourse of these FBOs the Argentinian state has adopted post-neoliberalist policies, which they termed neodevelopmentalism. Occipinti concludes that though this shift in state policies may be more discursive than substantive, the religious-based non-profits have had transformative consequences in these indigenous communities.

The second essay by political scientist Serdar Kaya investigates the causes of outgroup prejudice in Europe based on an evolutionary social psychological approach. He analyzes the primary data from the European Values Study that includes 43 European countries. Using multilevel regression models Kaya tests the hypothesis that prejudice against outgroups such as immigrants, Muslims, Jews, homosexuals, the Roma, and people of different races is based on a protective outlook and sense of distrust and caution that derives from an evolved social psychology based on the conditions of ancestral environments. In the ancestral environments of hunter-gatherer societies during the Paleolithic, natural selection may have favored individuals who tended to distrust others especially strangers in order to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their ingroups. Thus, humans presently have the tendency to distrust and feel suspicious of outsiders, especially in insecure environments. This argument eschews any type of genetic or biological determinism. After testing the hypothesis with this large data set from Europe Kaya concludes that individuals that have a distrustful, cautious, and suspicious outlook on people in general are more likely to be prejudiced against multiple outgroups. He concludes that his study has limitations. It does not answer fundamental questions regarding how distrust or trust is activated within different individuals. Yet, Kaya’s careful analysis does help illuminate some of the social psychological factors that result in outgroup prejudice.

The third essay by Chad Haines, a religious studies scholar at Arizona State discusses how Muslim cosmopolitanism that derive from the Islamic tradition have provided new types of informal ethical communities that have produced alternative non-absolutist religious frameworks from that of ISIS and other terrorist organizations. He argues that the conceptions of ‘global citizens’ and the cosmopolitan vision is usually tied to the Western liberal framework that produces a particular and absolutist and universalizing vision of modernity, which constructs hierarchical categories of good (individuals, states, or ‘civilizations) that need saving versus bad (individuals, states, or ‘civilizations’) that need condemnation. Haines uses two case studies from the Muslim world that demonstrate his argument. First he traces how the roots of the Western notions of global citizenship and cosmopolitanism that emerged in a fictive account of ancient Greece and Rome, but, in actuality, were inextricably tied with imperial global projects. Likewise presently, concepts of global citizenship in the West are bound up with the neoliberal policies of the 1980s and 1990s of the IMF, World Bank, and USAID, and later projections of imperial interests as in the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Haines compares the ideological absolutism of ISIS cosmopolitanism with that of the Western liberal cosmopolitanism that whitewashes their inherent violence and destruction. He describes a more inclusive Muslim cosmopolitanism rooted in the ideals of Medina in the seventh century. He argues that those ideals, although disrupted by Western colonization and imperialism, were in evidence during the eruption of the peaceful demonstrations and the Arab Spring in Tahrir Square in January 2011. An emergent ‘community,’ not ‘imagined’ as in Benedict Anderson’s descriptions nor ‘invented’ in Ranger and Hobsbawm’s discussions, but a non-ideological formation that bound people together based on their shared humanity that represents a Muslim cosmopolitanism.

The fourth essay by German anthropologist Christoph Antweiler also explores cosmopolitanism by relying on the discussion and studies of universals by anthropologists and other sociologists. He argues that a truly realistic and inclusive humanism and cosmopolitanism must be based on the empirical studies of universals, which have been discovered and investigated by anthropologists and other social scientists. Like Haines, Antweiler indicates that the Western liberal cosmopolitanism perspective often relied on the imposition of so-called Western-centric ‘universals,’ usually through coercion and force, on various peoples around the world. He proposes a realistic bio-cultural view of humanity along with other factors that result in universals to develop an empirical access to ‘humanness,’ an alternative to both extreme cultural relativism and to the absolute given universals proposed by some scholars. Antweiler distinguishes absolute universals from ‘near’ universals, and ‘implicational universals,’ or ‘evolutionary universals’ proposed by sociologist Talcott Parsons that create ultrasociality in large-scale complex societies. He argues that the obsession with alterity and cultural difference and the marginalization of the study of universals are obstacles for the development of a realistic and inclusive cosmopolitan humanism.

The fifth essay by anthropologist Robert Graber develops a model of political evolution using regression analysis using decennial time-series data. Tracing political evolution from small-scale hunter-gatherer bands that subsisted on wild plant and animal resources that usually split off into similar small groups rather than evolving larger political units, he indicates that human societies have an intrinsic propensity not to grow but to proliferate. This proliferation of small villages without political centralization continued with horticultural ‘tribes’ such as the Yanomamö. Graber notes that Robert Carniero’s ‘circumpscription theory’ that argued that population pressure and reduced opportunities for geographic expansion or ‘social circumscription,’ surrounded by other peoples resulted in warfare and conquest and the evolution of chiefdom-level centralized political entities. Graber explores whether this theory has relevance to the twentieth century. He refers to German expansionism predating World War I and the notions of “lebensraum” espoused by Hitler to annex the Soviet Union, along with other European and Japanese imperial strategies that were driven by population pressure. However, despite the numerous wars of the 20th century, there was not a subsequent fusion into larger political entities, but rather a fissioning into a larger number of slightly-larger societies. In contrast to larger scale societies, World War I and World War II resulted in the development of voluntary federations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations. Graber’s regression analysis demonstrates a strong relationship between the development and evolution of voluntary federations and global population pressure. He concludes that with the development of nuclear weapons, war as a threat rather than conquest is the driving force of modern political evolution.

As in the past, we have a number of book reviews and one film review for those scholars who have an interest in interdisciplinary research and in globalization and its consequences throughout the world. Again, as we stated in our first issue of the journal, we intend to maintain this standard of generalized interdisciplinary readability for all of our essays and book reviews in future issues of our journal. We hope that you will subscribe to our journal to read future essays, review essays, and book reviews. We also invite you to submit essays, review essays, book reviews, and suggest possible book reviews for the journal.

Sincerely,

Raymond Scupin, Ph.D. Director: Center for International and Global Studies Professor of Anthropology and International Studies Lindenwood University