Cosmopolitanism is one of those ubiquitous concerns which, while never going away entirely, seems to return regularly with a difference -- with renewed urgency, novel ramifications, and new challenges. In the 21st century we inhabit a world in which extractive capitalism has expanded to reach almost every corner of the earth and every aspect of our lives; in which the planetary environment is at risk, as evidenced by the loss of biodiversity, the effects of climate change, and the devastat...

The knowledge disseminated by universities and mobilized by states to govern populations has been globally dominant for more than a century. It first emerged in the early modern period in Europe and subsequently became globalized through colonialism. Despite the historical and cultural specificity of its origins, modern Western knowledge was thought to have transcended its particularities such that, unlike pre-modern and non-Western knowledges, it was "universal," or true for all times and...

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's book Empire has been hailed as a latter day Communist Manifesto. Its ability to develop a theoretical framework relevant to the current period of global neo-liberalism and international capitalism captured the imagination of the growing anti-capitalist movement and has been claimed as a turning point for the left.As much as it has seduced and delighted some, however, it has enraged and frustrated others. In this collection, a serie...

Over the last four decades, Dipesh Chakrabarty’s astonishingly wide-ranging scholarship has elaborated a range of important issues, especially those of modernity, identity, and politics – in dialogue with postcolonial theory and critical historiography – on global and planetary scales. All of this makes Chakrabarty among the most significant (and most cited) scholars working in the humanities and social sciences today. The present text comprises substantive yet short, academic yet accessib...