Abstract
This introductory overview focuses on contemporary changes to re-globalization processes as regards experimental conceptual framings. At the center of its considerations is the factual and potential use of the heuristic term “re-globalization,” including its opportunities and its limits of validity, with regard to timely processes of transition and transformation. The first issue to note here is that the term “re-globalization” has many, partly opposing facets. “Re-globalization,” understood as an object of research, is a phase of rupture, reform, and renewal of the neoliberal-hyper-cosmopolitan era that lasted from the end of the 1980s until the mid-2010s. The phase since then is not identical to the initial stage of “globalization euphoria” and thus needs an adequate, new conceptual framework of analysis. The question is whether “re-globalization” can be such an open framework concept, at least in a non-conclusive perspective. Second, as an analytical approach, “re-globalization” is recently being used relatively indiscriminately as an anamnestic, diagnostic, and therapeutic notion, where all three – very different – implications are often mixed into each other, thus making its academic-scientific use difficult, if not problematic. Therefore, the main task today is to properly contextualize the use of the term “re-globalization” to the challenges which it aims to represent concerning the intertwined socio-political, economic, cultural, religious, demographic, and technological phases of transition we are witnessing; and to contextualize its use in more exact ways according to the varying anamnestic, diagnostic and therapeutic needs.