A Renewed Global Sociology

Abstract

The great challenge of our times is the progressive emergence of a planetary consciousness that will enable us to face together the common challenges that we face, starting with global warming, the environmental crisis, rising inequalities, and the threats to democracy. If we, sociologists, are up to the task, sociology will contribute to this planetary awareness and take its place in solving some of the challenges of this century.
While sociology aims at understanding the transformations of our world, our discipline is also affected and itself transformed by them. This is notably the case of the project of global sociology, which needs to be revisited considering the transformations that our world and social sciences have gone through over the past decades. I started studying globalisation in the late 1990s. By then, it was a central topic in sociology. ‘Sociology for One World’ (Archer 1991) was already the theme for the ISA 1990 World Congress. Three decades later, global challenges have become even more critical. Our world has become increasingly ‘global’. However, in the meanwhile, how we see the world, globalisation and sociology have changed dramatically. In this short address, I will briefly mention four of these changes, why they require renewing the project of a global sociology, and what they have meant for ISA.