Pillars of globalization

Globalization as a process has been effecting human civilizations since the beginning of documented history. Where this process has brought us and where it is leading our policies, our security, and our future largely depends on the decisions that states take today.

This publication also emphasizes that for globalization to benefit humanity, the three major cultures of the world (Eastern cultures, Arab-Islamic cultures, and Western cultures), along with others, have to unite and uphold the world together (represented diagrammatically on the front cover) and not separately from one another.

Three diagnostic tools provide the means for measuring the impact of globalization from a number of perspectives and outline what we can expect for the future of the international system. The proposed timeline of globalization is very comprehensive and provides unique historical insights that are not focused only on events in Western civilizations. The reader will be surprised at their relevance to today's world events and their depth.

In defining globalization, the authors provide an innovative and inclusive yet simple new definition of globalization which states that:

"Globalization is a process that encompasses the causes, course, and consequences of transnational and transcultural integration of human and non-human activities."

The authors also provide the basis for careful analysis and conceptualization through the use of an innovative globalization matrix designed to predict patterns and policy as states handle the effects of this process as well as matrices for security and stability. This book provides an evolutionary and encyclopaedic reference to this vital concept and should provide a cornerstone for any further study when assessing the impact of globalization on our historical, modern, and future world.

NAYEF R.F. AL-RODHAN is Senior Member of St. Antony's College, University of Oxford, UK. He is also Senior Fellow and Director of the Center for the Geopolitics of Globalization and Transnational Security at the Geneva Center for Security Policy, Geneva, Switzerland. He is a philosopher, neuroscientist, and geostrategist. A prize-winning scholar, he has published 21 books proposing many innovative concepts and theories in global politics and security. He was educated at Yale University, the Mayo Clinic and Harvard University. He is best known for several philosophical and analytic books on global politics that include: The Role of the Arab-Islamic World in the Rise of the West; Meta-Geopolitics of Outer Space; Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man; Emotional Amoral Egoism; Neo-Statecraft and Meta-Geopolitics; The Politics of Emerging Strategic Technologies and Symbiotic Realism.