Area studies and their problematiques are ill suited to deal with human relations
spilling over area boundaries, and we have to devise more adequate perspectives to
encompass these. Although globalisation studies emphasise the growth of worldwide
networks (new media, capital flows, diasporas, international organisations, the `global city'), there are many other border crossings that need to be understood. It is a mistake
to assume that the most revealing crossings are those between the West and the rest.
Understandings of global linkages need to emerge forcefully form direct exchanges
between scholars studying different parts of the `South'
A major task in the restructuring of the world academy in the early 21st century is
the building up of institutions that allow academics trained in the study of a particular
area to overcome such boundaries and to communicate more meaningfully across them
at all levels: the production of theoretical knowledge, thematic focus, methodology,
empirical skills.We need academic versions of the strategy of ``jumping scales'' (Smith,
1992, page 60), which allows us ``to circumvent or dismantle historically entrenched
forms of territorial organization and their associated scalar morphologies''